


common creatures

by coldmackerel



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, even london has monsters and even monsters have favorites, i had to up the rating for incomprehensible monster sex, literal eldritch horror villanelle, spooky little love story, these are my confessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:00:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27083770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldmackerel/pseuds/coldmackerel
Summary: “I was going to kill you awfully,” Villanelle explains in earnest.Eve’s mouth goes flat and she turns her head back to profile, watching the street and not the evil thing at her side, brave or just stubborn. “Well. You should have led with that, then.”
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 182
Kudos: 537





	1. x.

**Author's Note:**

> don't you dare come in here and accuse me of metaphor

____________________

x.

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Villanelle does not remember how she came to be, but then, neither do you.

Her understanding, pre-concept, pre-impression, pre-reflection is that she was not named, she was not held, she was not hoped for or hoped upon, she is perhaps the only thing thus unexplained by will or want or imagination and that, at least, is some claim she has that you do not.

If memory is a thing you hang on your wall, to Villanelle it is more like a cloaked omen oft unrecognized, but familiar all at once - a person who might point or jerk their chin to the side when she seeks direction or familiarity. Undependable, never hers, never near, never clear. A haunting not yet metaphysical, vaguer somehow still.

Despite this, something manifests.

Villanelle remembers a woman named Eve and hangs that on her wall, she thinks. If that is, in fact, how it works.

Villanelle remembers because she comes to Eve as arbitrarily as she comes to anyone - perhaps more so than _anyone_ , she’s not even there for Eve, she’s not _this_ for Eve. She’s never given opportunity to consider what exactly she’d have been for her, but that's just part of their...themness.

Instead she assumes some alluring form - well, as much as form can be assumed. _Form_ being another archaic mental gymnastic of the prototypical, but, well, for these purposes, yes _form._ Not the way you understand it to be, but the way Villanelle understands it to be. If understanding is dimension, it’s a shame you only see three.

Eve sees her in shades of beauty and shades of unsettling, like art Villanelle thinks later. Perception is a quick-study medium, easily molded, interpretive and pretty in its own way. Eve perceives a young woman when she sees her first. Soft hair, expressive, seductive and desirable, and just that little bit off in the unnatural length of incisors, maybe, or sharp nails or flashes of strange irises, just these little sinister things that Villanelle can never manage to swallow down.

She’s good, but she’s not that good.

If you don’t see it, it’s only because you’re not looking.

Eve looks. From across the bar Villanelle’s decided she favors, Eve looks intently and she looks often until Villanelle loses whatever waning interest she has in the investment banker with a tan line around his naked fat ring finger who keeps mentioning that he owns a boat. At the beginning of the evening she thought it might be exciting to chase him around a dock, pull him by his ankles into horrible murky depths, reptilian jaws, nightmares that fill his lungs down, down into the Thames - 

Eh, something light. Things have been dull.

The payoff seems far away, he won’t stop talking, Eve stares and it starts to take on a suspicious flavor that makes Villanelle grin back when she can’t help herself. The man doesn’t notice he’s lost her attention, they never notice much of anything, do they? Eve sits up straight in her seat, looking awful serious, and she leans away _just_ enough to make Villanelle wonder if she’s been caught.

It happens. People listen when the hairs rise along the backs of their necks, people take themselves seriously enough to run the other way even if they’re incapable of knowing why. Prey instinct is a powerful thing.

Oh. He’s still talking.

Villanelle turns back to him and smiles with what probably isn’t the correct amount of teeth, but it does the job. He pales. “Leave or I will eat you,” she tells him, not unkindly! Considering how she thought the evening would go, it’s an active kindness.

Whatever slips out from behind her pretty mask drives him away with a little trip and stumble, leaving a bill far too large on the counter and forgetting his scarf on the hook beneath the counter. Eve watches these things too and doesn’t even bother to look away when Villanelle hops off her stool and stalks down the length of the bar to swing around the corner and drop into the space next to hers.

“You’re watching me,” Villanelle says with a sneaky little grin. It does excite her, she can’t deny it. Vanity is not a human concept, it’s just got picky little human definitions, puts itself in small boxes and for what?

Eve tips her chin in acknowledgement. She’s got one hand under the table, fingers curled into her key ring in case, what? Villanelle tries to _eat her?_

Ha!

“What do you see?” And that is the excitement talking, it’s not a normal thing to say to a normal girl. If that is, in fact, what Eve is. She wears the skin of one, certainly - pretty, pretty skin.

But? So does Villanelle when it suits her.

Eve lifts her gin slowly to her lips and takes a long drink - drains it, actually, but she never takes her eyes from Villanelle and she _is_ a smart girl, clever, clever little common creature. “I don’t know. More than you probably wanted me to.”

  
“You don’t know what I want.”

Eve squints at her, eyes tracking plainly around Villanelle’s face, the one she wears. She lets it flicker, why not? If Eve wants to see so badly, then so be it.

“What are you?” Eve murmurs and it’s all her fault, everything that happens next, from top to bottom. Villanelle won’t be sharing blame because Eve _leans in._

Villanelle laughs, it’s a funny question. “What are _you?”_ She reflects.

Eve purses her lips and her brow furrows probably deeper than the question warranted. Without much of an answer, Eve shrugs like she concedes the point and flags for another drink.

Villanelle leans in too.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Villanelle asks Eve what she’s afraid of when she’s found her way to the bottom of three strong drinks, loose lips and messy truth.

Eve says she is afraid of small insects with too many articulable limbs, ghosts, birds that fly too close, drowning, being in a plane that crashes into the ocean.

Eve is not afraid of these things, she dislikes these things. Eve is afraid of being trapped in small spaces where nobody can find her, forgetting how to be happy, what she’s capable of and what she might not be, being cruel, liking it. To name a few.

Villanelle doesn’t point it out to her, she likes the way Eve talks like she’s sticking scared, curious fingers between cage bars, the way she’ll suddenly swallow thoughts like jerking her fingers back before something takes a bite. She thinks she’s quick, but Eve hasn’t seen Villanelle lunge yet.

“What are you afraid of?” Eve asks her and it’s almost like she’s opened the cage entirely.

Villanelle likes that - a foreign concept, _liking._ “I don’t know yet,” she says thoughtfully, tapping her chin. “I’ve sampled the available flavors and find them lacking.”

Eve laughs an ugly laugh, deep, uncouth and unreserved and Villanelle thinks she’d like the taste of it when she licks at the back of her own sharp teeth.

“Tastes change.”

“Mine haven’t.”

Eve signals for another drink and Villanelle finds herself captivated enough to sit through it. She’s favored the bar in the past for the way it hides itself. Metaphor is a dull thing, please don’t read too much into it.

It’s an establishment lax on smoking rules, cheap veneer of a century past, almost a replica speakeasy if it could afford it. Instead they whine Billie Holiday through the speakers like _close enough_. The lighting’s low, the people loney, the drinks cheap and frequent. It’s an easy place to lure people from dim to dark. Oh, what’s one more step into the shadows, hm?

Well, _fatal_. Not to spoil the riddle.

Eve isn’t being lured so much as she’s luring and it may be clumsy, but it’s endearing. Like fishing with a trout hook for a great white. A shame to waste, she may almost be fun. If she knew just what Villanelle is, would she really try to trap it? Or would she cut the line and run? Food for thought.

The snare fails either way, Eve drinks a little too much and loses the thread, yawns into her fist. Villanelle walks in her footsteps, a tall shadow at Eve’s back as she escorts her to a bus shelter two blocks away to wait for the undependable night bus with shivering, jittering knees and hands. The closest streetlight isn’t close enough for Eve to see well by, but darkness is a concept relative to human frailty.

Villanelle sees just fine.

Eve watches the street, her head swaying a bit and maybe she’s hearing Billie Holiday in her head, she must be as she starts humming it under her drunk breath. Humans come in few flavors, but Villanelle thinks she tastes something almost unique while she stares at Eve’s profile in the vulnerable dark, listening to her tuneless song. Her breath forms little ghosts in the dark. She looks so good, Villanelle could just eat her up.

She feels her spine creak as it shifts upwards, builds her up to a frightening height while her fingers crawl out across her knobby knees as they curl longer and longer. The delicate surface tension of beauty ripples across her face, eyes flashing, teeth sharper, endless and numerous. Eve’s frame shrinks smaller and smaller beside her as she looms ominous in the dark, casts shadow over darkness until Eve turns to look up at her with a little start.

Starting at her sightline, Eve looks up and up from each button of her coat as they multiply up to Villanelle’s throat, right up to her gaunt face as it slips off. Eve breathes in long enough that the fog in front of her pretty mouth stops, fades. “You got taller,” she breathes out after she's seen her fill, matter of fact.

In the next moment, Villanelle deflates back into herself with a loud laugh, brackish and stupid. She folds back into a young woman and grins. “You’re not scared?”

“No.”

“I was going to kill you awfully,” Villanelle explains in earnest.

Eve’s mouth goes flat and she turns her head back to profile, watching the street and not the evil thing at her side, brave or just stubborn. “Well. You should have led with that, then.”

Pretty again, just for her, Villanelle covers the worst of herself. She’s not often given the pleasure of good humor. “You are...strange.”

Eve gives her a doubtful little look and crosses her arms tight over her chest. “You tried to eat me,” she counters.

“I didn’t try. I’ll try later.”

“Why wait?”

Villanelle smiles and tosses her chin toward the far end of the block. “Your bus is here.”

Harsh headlights cut through the darkness as it lumbers closer and Eve cuts it one reluctant look between studying Villanelle’s amused face. When the bus pulls up and gives a little wheeze of a honk, Eve stands and gathers her bag up with a hesitant look on her face. Villanelle smiles back, waggles her fingers fondly. “Goodnight, Eve,” she bids her.

Eve watches her as she backs toward the doors, keeps her eyes on her for as long as she can even until she’s found her seat, pressed against the window as though she’s afraid Villanelle will disappear. 

And she will, Eve is right. What a funny thing to fear.

The bus leaves, Eve unharmed and whole by some funny twist of fate. If Villanelle could like things, she thinks she would like Eve. Maybe she could try that on too.

  
  


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Villanelle next thinks of Eve while she’s pressing her long clawed fingers down a woman’s throat, fun until it’s not. Seductive, until she chokes and then the poor woman’s kicking and her eyes are wide and she sees Villanelle the way she’s supposed to. But, oh it’s much too late by then.

Villanelle pushes down her throat, shushing her until blood wells up and her face empties and the fun is over. She’s bored again.

As she flops back into the woman’s cheap sheets, she absently scratches sharp nails against her naked belly and sighs. Dully, she turns her head to the side and gives the woman’s vacant, dead eyes a look like, _now what?_

But then she thinks of Eve and she doesn’t think of people much at all. She remembers her, just like that! Like a passing fancy, which she’s never really had.

Villanelle sits up and wraps her arms loosely around her drawn-up knees, folding her hands thoughtfully. Her fingers swirl streaks of red against the soft skin she wears on her bones and she hums a grainy song she heard in a bar not too long ago while she allows herself to enjoy the experience of thinking about Eve. It makes her smile, strangely enough, and she turns to share it, conspiratory in the look she shares with the pretty woman’s slack expression. She’s not much company anymore, Villanelle laments.

Eve is, though. _Still_ , despite Villanelle’s predilections to snuff the shiny things that draw her eye.

She decides she’ll find her. She’ll chase the feeling.

  
  


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It’s smell that leads her there. Unique, useful in that preternatural kind of way that you’ll just have to take her word for. Eve appears to live in an attached duplex with a little sandbox of a backyard on a quiet street. The yard is planted plainly like a loveless labor and the shutters open. As Villanelle peers in through the dark and quints against the warm comfort of dull homey lighting, she sees Eve at a dining table, fork stilled in one hand over a cooling plate while she focuses on the folded magazine in her other hand. There’s a man at the table who’s vollying little pleasant bits of conversation, seldom returned.

How very boring.

Villanelle puts the pads of her fingers against the warmth of the window and cocks her head to the side to watch Eve play at this life. It’s funny! So maybe Eve does have her disguises, but she hides it poorly from a master.

Little time passes before Eve’s head lists to the side and she slowly places her magazine down. This excites the kind-faced husband who perks up and starts talking twice as much. Poor thing, Eve’s not listening. She turns slowly and glances toward the window and Villanelle’s eyes flash wicked colors in the dark.

She taps her fingers soundlessly, smiles white against the dark just for Eve.

Eve stares.

Husband doesn’t see.

Dinner is cut short and it makes Villanelle preen to see Eve’s plate go unfinished, husband go broody, backdoor open while Eve escapes to meet her in the dark of a droopy, slowly starving willow straddling two neglectful neighbors.

“Are you here to kill me now?” Eve asks in good humor.

It pleases Villanelle well enough. “No. I thought of you.”

“Why?”

Villanelle smiles, a bearing of terrible teeth. “I don’t know. I don’t think of people. Just you.”

Eve flushes and Villanelle likes that too, _interesting._

  
  


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Of all the fatally curious, inquisitive little vertebrates in London, Eve is by far the most recklessly entertaining.

The unknown is the basest flavor of fear. Disguise doesn’t need to be detailed, it just has to obscure enough for imagination to take over. These are great weapons, first nature to a thing like her that preys on antediluvian ignorance. A healthy appreciation for the unexplained.

But Eve likes to touch, she likes to look, she likes to know. When Villanelle pulls a person apart, it’s not of great interest to her, it’s just a good way to make them scream. When Eve does it, she stops, looks down at her hands and considers just what she’s dismantled.

It may put her at a certain disadvantage, _the knowing_ of this creature called Eve - the hat-trick is less intriguing, the rabbit less shocking, when you know about the compartment in the table - but Villanelle finds herself letting it happen. Eve asks questions and touches her and pulls her apart with clumsy human hands and it’s not without value, but it is strange being handled in a way antithetical to her nature. Eve’s very fragile, meat and pretty eyes and endless curiosity. If she’s not careful, she’ll hurt herself.

Eve studies her, in her own capacity.

When Villanelle comes to Eve at an office, elbow-deep in government files, long after everyone’s gone home for dinner, Eve calls her out from the shadows and Villanelle comes. She’s never been _beckoned_ before. “What gave me away?” Villanelle teases.  
  


“Unease. Foreboding. I think my instinct knows better than I do.”

“Maybe you should be listening,” Villanelle intones lightly as she comes to stand tall over Eve’s little cutout desk. The monitor casts a pretty blue light across Eve’s face like lit water. Villanelle borrows the color so Eve can see it shine back through wide, unnatural eyes.

“Is this you? Did you do this?” Eve asks bluntly. She turns the monitor, swivels it and knocks a cup of pencils to the ground as the shift upsets the balance of clutter on her desk. Villanelle looks with vague interest at the collage of bloody photographs scattered open across Eve’s desktop, poorly shuffled cards of gruesomely bent limbs and ragged wounds.

Villanelle hardly pays it mind. “Oh. Maybe,” she shrugs.

“Why be shy now?” Eve asks dryly and it draws a bemused smile to Villanelle’s face.

“I don’t keep those thoughts. I don’t save them for later.”

“You mean you don’t remember them?”

“Yes, the thinking long term backwards. The things that have happened, I don’t save them for myself,” Villanelle nods and props a thigh against the front of Eve’s desk, making herself comfortable. “I told you I don’t think of people.”

“But you thought of me.”

“I still do,” Villanelle grins, tapping a finger against her temple. “Have you been thinking of me?”

Eve swings the face of her monitor back around and clicks ticky little moments against the sticky track of her mouse, eyes flickering across the pages. “I’ve been thinking about what you are.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re unusual and I think maybe I’m not supposed to know what you are. Or even _that_ you are.”

“Very naughty,” Villanelle agrees. She drapes a hand over the top of the monitor, lets long, longer nails sharpen and tap tap against the screen. When Eve still clicks away, Villanelle sets her chin on top too and pouts until Eve looks up. “Why must you know? If you shouldn’t?”

“Bad habit. My worst.”

“Hm,” Villanelle nods, fluttering her eyelashes. She’s not sure why she’s still wearing the pretty woman she cobbled together for the investment banker, but it holds something that might approximate sentimental value. She likes when Eve looks. The light of recognition. “You might get hurt, Eve.”

“I might,” Eve agrees. Terms negotiated and notarized.

  
  


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“How did you...begin?” Eve wonders. They’re skipping rocks across the river. They both know Eve is due home for boring dinner with boring husband who’s planning boring sex for their boring anniversary. So says Eve. Embellished, slightly.

Villanelle’s still picking pieces of a belligerent cab driver’s sinew from between her teeth, which Eve watches with grotesque fascination. Running into Eve was fortunate happenstance.

Fortune always in Villanelle’s control, of course, but fortune nonetheless.

“I don’t know,” Villanelle ponders - a thing wholly foreign to her, _pondering_. Considering at all, really. It’s good to have new hobbies, though. “I imagine it was not good, though.”

Eve laughs in the back of her throat. If curiosity is her worst habit, her faint amusement at these horrors is her best, Villanelle decides. “No, it probably wasn’t.”

“Are there others like you?”

“Eve, there is _nothing_ like me,” Villanelle assures her, smiling too wide, but she can’t help it. When Eve turns to look, study as she’s wont to do, Villanelle reaches out slowly for the loose dangle of her hand. Eve watches and her breath slows and she _smells_ afraid, but she does nothing. Brave little Eve. When Villanelle’s cold fingers find hers, she cups the back of Eve’s hand and lifts it gently to turn palm-up.

Eve’s eyes are wide, she’s _waiting._

_Pffft_ . For what? Villanelle places a perfect stone in Eve’s palm, flat and freakishly round, _perfect_ , it really is. Then she withdraws her hand and leaves Eve be, whole and healthy - if she was afraid otherwise. “That’s a good one. Almost perfect,” Villanelle informs her, then crouches back down to sift through the pebbles on the shore.

Eve starts breathing again, unclenches until Villanelle can’t feel her nerves vibrate like fine insect wings behind her. She winds up and twists as she casts the stone out. It skips five perfect arcs and sinks into the Thames. Her laugh is exhilarated when she spins and stares down at Villanelle rummaging in the dirty rocks. “If there’s nothing like you, don’t you get lonely?”

“What’s that?”

“Loneliness?” Eve seems doubtful, but she kicks at loose shale and gestures like it should be obvious. “You know. Missing people? Or...things? Company?”

“What people?”

“Any people,” Eve swings an arm in a wide arc.

Villanelle folds her arms on her bent knees and looks up at Eve. “Why would I miss any people?”

“I don’t know,” Eve exasperates. “Most things crave companionship at least sometimes.”

“I’m not most things.” Nothing’s so perfect as the last stone she put in Eve’s shaking palm, but she finds acceptable alternates and stands upright again, stretches her shifting spine tall and stalks back toward Eve. It must take her somewhat by surprise, because she falters back a step and it makes Villanelle stop.

Villanelle’s brow furrows and she shrinks back into herself, diminutive to an acceptable level until Eve stops backing away and finds her footing again. Villanelle stays where she is and holds out the stones. It’s a different kind of luring than she’s used to, no prize at the end of the hook except Eve’s tentative approach, her fearful fingers scooping into her palm.

Eve survives this ordeal too and she still seems surprised. Without fully appreciating the shapes Villanelle has picked out for her, Eve looks at her in the dark with her full fist pressed tight against her chest. “You’re not like most things,” she repeats quietly.

“Neither are you,” Villanelle reminds her.

  
  


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Eve leaves her backdoor open, which is a gesture probably. She understands Villanelle can be where she likes, when she likes, as she likes, so the act of leaving a door open is symbolic, but useless. Amusing, almost sweet, almost sentimental.

Many almosts, but the house is well lit and warm, _cozy_. Villanelle’s least favorite.

She waits in the overgrown, underloved garden bench under the dying willow when she fancies a visit and most times, Eve finds her there. Not always - sometimes Villanelle watches her putter around through the window above the sink as she moves belongings about the house, glances off her husband in soft and sometimes not soft ways, exists. It shouldn’t interest her, but it does, even that.

Usually Eve finds her way outside, though, bundled against the cold - the weather and Villanelle’s touch, both. Sometimes she brings a mug of something warm and puts it in Villanelle’s clawed hands and staunchly ignores the futility of the gesture, the teasing that results.

Villanelle holds it anyways, a gracious guest.

Eve asks questions, she always does.

“How many people have you killed?”

“Why do you kill them?”

“Where do you go in the daytime?”

“Do you look the same to everyone?”

“What do you really look like?”

“What do you feel when you kill a person?

_“What are you?”_

To name a few.

There aren’t satisfying answers. Villanelle has never been in the business of consideration, existential or otherwise, and even when she does her best for Eve, she’s constrained by the limitless quandary of an existence predicated on the unknown. The sinister and unknowable. It must chafe Eve terribly.

“Many. Few. Several. Often.”

“It’s what I do.”

“I do not. I am not.”

“No.”

“I do not exist absent perception. Does anything? Do you?”

“Hungry.”

“I don’t know.”

Respectively. Each answer winds Eve up further. She doesn’t push the abstract, doesn’t demand of her and whether that’s healthy fear or acceptance, Villanelle can’t say. Eve swallows each bit and stays hungry.

Eve studies her, draws her, maps her, collects pieces of the things she’s done like inscrutable puzzle pieces that might even be art some day if she can only put them all together. As Eve asks her little riddles of existence, twists and turns and swaps pieces, Villanelle answers some, answers none, true and false and Eve likes all of it, fooled by none of it.

Villanelle stays away less. Even when she’s snapping up hapless men and doe-eyed women in sharp teeth, beckoning them into alleyways and under bridges never to be seen again, she always feels some sense tuned, turned absently toward the beacon of Eve’s little life. Funny.

It might be only that which saves Eve’s little life: a passing interest when Villanelle feels the lit match of her pinprick existence flicker even some distance away. She’s drawn to the disturbance.

Eve’s beating a man with her handbag, which is fun to watch.

He twists the straps around his arm, jerks it high above her head and backhands her hard across her face, which is less fun to watch.

It’s just in bad taste, really. If anyone’s going to lay hands on her, wrap their fingers around her fragile throat and pound her head against the brick behind them, it’s going to be Villanelle. It’s hers.

Villanelle’s not altogether certain what she looks like when she twists fingers into the hair at the top of his head as she looms over him, rips his head back and pulls everything important in his soft little throat out with her teeth. Swallows. Licks her lips.

It probably isn’t good, though.

He dies quickly - they do that, you know - and then she’s left holding him up by his ugly head. Eve’s dripping in what’s left of him, an unflattering byproduct. Her eyes peer out from the red, sticky mask like bus headlights in the dark and Villanelle lets their guest crumple past limp knees into a heap between them.

“Hi Eve.”

Eve runs.

  
  
  
  
  


____________________

xx.

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @coldmackerels on twitter for horror of a different kind : my every passing thought


	2. xx.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> how do we first start to covet?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you're all monsters to me :)
> 
> (slight content warning for brief, non-graphic mention of child abuse)

  
  


____________________

xx.

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Eve runs, sure, but she’s not very fast.

Part of the following that results is instinct. You don’t run from a predator, Eve, even one you’re enamored of.

The other part is just utility.

For one, Eve’s proven she can’t be trusted to keep herself whole and un-murdered, even against weak little men with weak little vices. And for another, Eve had left her handbag behind with the keys to the house she’s so desperate to escape to. So Villanelle sees her home from a distance, swinging Eve’s purse from bloody fingers and watching her flee with less amusement than she’d imagined.

At last, Eve is frightened - the way she should be - a matter of time - for the best, really...

But still. A bit of a shame.

All the same, if fright keeps Eve from picking fights with violent pickpocket brawlers, reeking of terror, twice her weight, then it has some value. She’s glass bones and steel resolve. If it’s not this alleyway, it’ll be the next, and if the only thing keeping her alive is a thing like  _ Villanelle’s _ interest, she’s going to spoil awful quick.

Villanelle sighs and wipes a palm across her sticky cheek. It had been fun, though. Them.

When Eve reaches her door at just barely less than a panicked sprint, she grabs the handle with both hands and jerks her body weight back, trying to rip the locked door open - does it a few more times for good, frantic measure. There’s a moment where she freezes, visibly grasps she’s not remembered her keys, and Villanelle shakes her head with a wet smile.

Until, of course, Villanelle remembers she’s not controlled what that smile may look like and quickly stuffs it back into her mouth before Eve spins on her heel. No need to make things worse.

Eve is breathing heavily, pupils wide and stricken and Villanelle raises her free hand in a limp greeting. It only makes Eve press harder back against her door and Villanelle lets her hand drop. She looks down toward her feet, just a little sheepish, and holds the bag forward. “You left it,” she explains dumbly.

When she chances a look upward, Eve is still pressed against the door, frozen and fearful.

Villanelle’s eyes drop again and she nods her understanding. Carefully, she sets the bag on the steps at the bottom of the stoop and begins backing away with her bloody palms tucked behind her back. “Okay?” She asks and she’s not sure why. It probably isn’t, not at all.

Eve doesn’t say anything and Villanelle nods like she agrees. “Okay.”

She melts back into the dark.

  
  


___________________

  
  
  


After, she’s dismayed to realize that though Eve probably doesn’t think of her anymore, she still thinks of Eve. Often. Smotheringly so.

At this point, the best she can hope for is that she’s scarred Eve for life. Not her finest work by any stretch, but an entertaining consolation prize.

She has a hard time feeling consoled, she’s too bored.

It makes her determined to exist as she had, in the  _ ways _ she had before she caught Eve’s ordinary self on some ghostly between-channel frequency as she tuned past.

Villanelle appears as she pleases, how she pleases, for whatever she pleases,  _ she does _ . She comes to a man in Bristol with a mean little piggish face and a nasty habit of spitting in streets as a tall unsettling thing in a drooping coat and a face she chooses not to have. She stalks him for weeks as he spits and frets and starts watching her over his shoulder. When she tires of it, she crawls through his window and strangles him against a wall while he flaps his stubby fingers against her wrists. When his head lolls to the side and his tongue swells behind his teeth, bloated and gross, it’s not as funny as it should be. Not like it was.

Villanelle appears to a woman with the stolen face of a man she’d dearly loved who’d never quite loved her and she says such sweet things to the woman even as her nails grow long under the table of the bar, even as she begins to dig them into her thigh harder and harder until the woman with sad, hopeful eyes jumps. Villanelle’s face turns hungry, eyes turn an inhuman shade of ill intention and the woman is lost in them, she doesn’t even hardly scream when Villanelle eats her whole in the alleyway between her flat and a crumbling little neighborhood church. Even when Villanelle’s pulling her skin open, the woman still looks at her like she thinks he’s come back for her. He hasn’t, he’s dead, she hardly looks like him at all. Villanelle laughs it into her face and the woman’s last little spark of life as blood bubbles up between her pretty lips doesn’t say  _ Oh. _ It’s doubtful. It says,  _ Still... _

Villanelle sighs in the sloppy aftermath as she wipes her hands on pleated trousers and can’t help but agree.  _ Still… _

Villanelle comes to a man bobbing his knee in a plastic hospital reception chair. His hair overgrows his temples, compensating for the thinness at the top. He fists a coffee nervously because he’s pulled too hard on his young daughter’s arm and the police aren’t there, but gosh, they very well could be. Villanelle appears to him thusly, crisp uniform and suspicious eyes he won’t meet and they talk for hours about nothing - his daughter doesn’t come up once. He sweats heavily into the collar of his cheap polyester shirt and right through the loosened band of his necktie and Villanelle leaves him gasping relief. If she’d only flicked her tongue out, she probably could have tasted the hormone-heavy tension of his anguish.

Villanelle visits his home a day later, crawls up from under his bathtub on horrible, jerking limbs, too many of them, really, long teeth and an eyeless face while he screams and drowns so, so slowly - she does play with with him a bit, his terror is delicious. All she really sees, though, is Eve’s wide, wide eyes and it sparks white hot in her gut.

She wears the man’s face when she wakes his daughter gently and takes her back to the hospital. It feels like trust, however sloppy the costume. As an afterthought, she gets her a snack - she can appreciate hunger at least - and leaves her eating crisps, balled up in the same chair that her father had occupied the day before. She doesn’t seem frightened at all.

Villanelle loses her appetite a bit after that. It happens.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


She waits until the night is fading into a place she doesn’t belong to go to the ugly garden behind Eve’s house. It’s creature compulsion, moth to flame, but not so desperately unaware that she arrives at any time Eve would be awake or alert to her presence. Quite the opposite, she’s not lost her senses, it’s just to be near for a few stolen moments. Just to see.

But she’s stopped in her tracks when she sees Eve sitting there under the willow through the long ghosts of the night, still holding a mug gone frigid, chin drooped to rest against the blanket covering her chest. She shivers and Villanelle watches, puzzled.

Did they have an appointment?

Her hands flap at her sides a moment, unclear on how to proceed. She’d like to touch, just a little.

Tiptoeing across the distance, Villanelle comes to stand over her bowed head, swaying over her like some ghastly omen and raising a hand to touch at the crown of her head. Before she can so much as place one gentle finger against her sleepy head, Eve startles awake and Villanelle totters backward, unsure. As Eve’s eyes clear, Villanelle begins to step into the shadow of the willow, begins to melt away.

“Wait!”

Villanelle waits.

“I’m sorry,” Eve bursts like it’s been knocking on her teeth for ages.

Villanelle’s gaze wanders away from Eve’s, dances around the half-hearted gardening a bit. “Why?”

Eve stands, blanket held around her shoulders, a cloak that billows at her ankles. “I should have thanked you. You saved me, right? That’s what you were doing?”

Is that what it was? Villanelle tries to do some remembering of her own, but all she does is think of Eve. Just...Eve. That’s all she’s managed after it all. Eve must be wrong, she’s misread the available evidence.

“Do not thank me yet,” Villanelle says slowly. “You don’t know what I’ve saved you for.”

“Do  _ you _ know?”

Villanelle falters, leans back and rocks on her heel as her gaze flits away again. “No,” she admits. “I don’t know.”

“Then thank you,” Eve decides, steel and glass. She shuffles forward, tied about the knees by the blanket she’s wrapped in and stops too close. Villanelle tucks her chin in and frowns as she considers what might be about to happen to her. One of Eve’s hands raises slowly from between the folds of the knit and Villanelle’s curious enough to watch it, see what it will do as it approaches, fingers extended toward the face she wears to put Eve at ease.

When Eve’s fingers touch her cheek, they’re very warm, the flush of a skipping pulse making them almost burn against the cold. Villanelle blinks at her, mouth pursed as she waits.

She feels something almost like surprise when Eve pushes up on her toes and presses dry lips to her cheek, just once. “Thank you,” Eve says again, close to her ear.   
  


“You already said that,” Villanelle murmurs.

  
“Yeah.” Eve’s fingers trail down off her cheek and slip off the line of her jaw, the cold rushes back in. “I’m sorry I ran. I won’t run again.”

It draws a hum of laughter from the back of Villanelle’s throat. “Why not? You’ll want to.”

“Not from you. I won’t have to.”

Villanelle searches Eve’s sincere face in the dimming night until her eyes crinkle in a smile. “I’ve failed terribly then,” she sighs, tilting her head back on her neck and blowing out cold breath into the fall sky, sightless, too cold to condensate. Her face stays toward the sky, but her eyes flick back to Eve’s naive little look. “You haven’t seen anything yet, Eve. It gets so much worse. It’ll get worse and I’ll like every moment of it.  _ That’s _ what I am.”

“Okay,” Eve says, nods like she’s been told her bus is a few minutes late.

She’s good, there’s no denying. Villanelle rolls her eyes lightly and reaches out to pull the drooping side of Eve’s blanket up over her shivering shoulder. Before she can withdraw, Eve catches her hand, fingers awkwardly wrapped around the edge of Villanelle’s palm, and gives her a sinfully innocent look, such that Villanelle has to swallow hard to stifle the beginnings of a hungry groan in the back of her throat. Temptation is often Villanelle’s command, not her fallacy. “Okay?” Eve asks, eyes wide and red-ringed.

Wearily, Villanelle folds her fingers over Eve’s in a gentle barely-there hold. As docile as she’s ever been, if you can believe it. “Okay,” she agrees.

Then and only then does Eve release her.

Promptly, she turns on her heel and sweeps back toward the bench she’d posted vigil at while Villanelle watches with interest, hand still hovering where Eve had left it. Eve bends toward the bench at her waist, then straightens and comes back with an ugly scrap of plaid wool.

Villanelle’s nose wrinkles and neither that nor the grimace she wears stops Eve from looping the thing around the back of Villanelle’s neck and tugging until she slouches down for Eve to tie it under her chin. “I got this for you,” Eve explains.

“Oh, it’s very ugly.”

“It’s a gift.”

“Is the gift for you? Is the gift seeing me in this awful thing? I thought you weren’t upset with me.”

Eve gives one end of the thing a snappy jerk to show her displeasure. “You’re a very cold creature of the darkness, you know? Just wear it.”

“I hate it, though. This is a bad gift.”

Eve beams up at her and it twists her up inside. “Yeah. You’re welcome.”

Speaking is a disguise in itself, a thing Villanelle knows without understanding. Such an archaic way to convey, as archaic as conveying itself, she supposes. Villanelle’s  _ good _ at disguises.

Villanelle’s good, but can’t think of anything to say to Eve, so instead she waits for the soft light of morning to cut between them.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Eve gets sick after that, because if you so much as breathe on humans wrong, they curl up and die. Like poorly plotted plants.

She’s laid up in bed with a snotty nose and fever-pink cheeks long enough for Villanelle to grow bored with making faces at her from her bedroom window every night. Eve must bore too, because eventually she gathers a thick comforter about her shoulders and wobbles over to the window to glare weakly at her instead of just tossing balled tissues from across the room. Villanelle grins and lounges, elbows on the windowsill and cheeks in her hands.

Eve burrows her nose into the blanket and scowls. Her hair is a mess and it makes Villanelle laugh as she motions upward with one mischievous finger,  _ open up, Eve. _

Eve shakes her head, obstinate.

All Eve can see of her must be the shaking of her shoulders, but rest assured there’s a good chuckle. Villanelle pouts her lower lip out until Eve rolls her eyes and wrestles the window open an inch.

“Stop making fun of me.”

“You look like a corpse,” Villanelle leans in to slip the words under Eve’s modest allowance.

“I do not.”

“I have seen many. I’ve made many. It’s a striking resemblance.”

Eve sneezes a half-dozen times, then growls. “This is your fault. What are you standing on? I’m on the second floor.”

“Nothing. I’m very long,” Villanelle shrugs with a confused smile. “Are you done yet? The, ah, sick thing. Is it done? I’m bored.”

“No,” Eve snaps, jerking the window up higher a few inches, probably to glare at her better. “Don’t you have something better to do? What do you do when you’re not bothering me?”

Villanelle gives her a sincere look. “I kill people, Eve. I manifest nightmares. You  _ know _ this. Are you dying? Can I watch?”

“Yes, I’m dying!” Eve bites, reaching out to slam the window shut. “And no you can’t watch.”

It gets caught on Villanelle’s hand as it shoots out to stop her. “Ouch.”

“Why are you here?”

Villanelle holds up a large bag of oranges and pushes them against the window for Eve to see. “I read a book about human illness. These are for you, because you called this ugly scarf a gift. My gift is better, I win. Eve, you’re breaking my hand.”

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


It gets much worse from there. The match that is Eve becomes a beacon and Villanelle can scarcely do anything without feeling her presence like a spotlight on her back, no matter how obstinately she turns towards the dark corners. Eve can’t follow her there, but she does try.

It’s  _ insistent _ and Villanelle doesn’t know why.

Eve shows Villanelle her favorite moving picture at a struggling drive-in theatre, just their rented car that smells like artificial pine and hardly anyone else in sight. Rain taps at the windows and makes the picture hard to see, but Eve’s said she likes it better that way. They catch glimpses through sluggish windshield wipers. It’s something about a smart man they’ve locked in a box, wicked and riddlesome and hungry and Villanelle doesn’t see much more than that. She watches Eve mostly, the way she mumbles lines in sync with the grainy FM feed.

Villanelle pushes her feet up onto the dashboard. “Why are we here?”

One of Eve’s forearms is resting on the steering wheel in front of her and she tilts her head lazily to glance in her direction. “Because this is my favorite movie.”

“Okay. Why am I here?”

“I like being with you.”

“Oh.”

Eve’s eyes crinkle when she smiles - that’s what she looks like when she likes something and Villanelle thinks it’s strange to see that reflected back at her. She’s never seen something like that before. “Look,” Eve points through the windshield and Villanelle turns to watch the man sit up from a stretcher, the visage of the face he’d cut from another man slipping off in a slide of gore. “It’s like you.”

Villanelle smiles despite herself, rolling her eyes even as they flush an evil red in her pleasure. “Sloppy,” she criticizes.

Eve catches the slip in her mask and laughs to herself, but doesn’t point it out. “Sloppy,” she agrees. “Stop watching me and watch the movie.”

Villanelle can do both and she will, but Eve must not know quite what she looks like with rain shadows cast like freckles across her pale face. She could almost be beautiful, if a person could be such.

_ “How do we first start to covet?” _

Villanelle scoffs and beats the riddle before Eve can mouth it. “People covet what they  _ see _ ,”she dismisses, rolling her eyes.

“Every day,” Eve finishes quietly.

  
  
  


_____________________

  
  
  


Eve likes other things.

Villanelle pins them to the wall too, puts them in a spot she won’t misplace.

Eve likes expensive-bound books and early editions, takeout from dirty little storefront restaurants, clothes she can’t tell are expensive but  _ are _ , flowers and green things, stories, microwave popcorn, antique wood-paneled radios, music older than her parents, soft blankets, mysterious phenomena, the quiet when the bars all close, when Villanelle’s eyes change colors, top shelf gin, and putting her hand in Villanelle’s when she’s feeling brave. Villanelle doesn’t know what that means, but it’s funny to watch her sneak through these dangerous spaces like a brave little mouse. It must thrill her so.

Villanelle adds that to the list.  _ Thrill. _

These are things Villanelle’s gathered through a careful process of trial and error.

Eve does  _ not _ like work, how flat it’s fallen compared to her expectations and dreams, she doesn’t like expenses she feels she can’t repay, mornings, the  _ really _ expensive things Villanelle tries leaving for her, talking about the husband living in her house, crossing bridges at night, mushrooms in food, when Villanelle comes to her in other skins, as other people, bright lights, and watching Villanelle rip a man’s throat out with her teeth.

To name a few.

Villanelle likens it to tinkering with a recipe, finding the ingredients she needs. For what? Hard to say, Villanelle’s never cooked before. Her diet thus far has been rather raw.

As an unintended consequence, she finds herself growing accustomed to the human flaw of liking. She enjoys liking Eve. A filthy habit, like spitting.

Even when Eve scolds her or puts a gift out on the front stoop like she’s not acknowledging its existence, Villanelle enjoys it. It’s yet another form of luring, she’s sure, she just doesn’t know yet what she’s trapping. It’s not Eve’s skipping pulse, it’s not her skin, thin like paper, or the iron taste of viscera. It’s not sexual per se, but it’s  _ something. _

Eve leaves her backdoor open. Villanelle knows because Eve will walk behind her dodering husband and unlatch the thing every time he scratches his head and secures it. Sometimes it’s the window above the sink too, the one that looks out toward the willow, until they fight about it in little snips that blow up into a brawl that Villanelle watches from the backyard. It’s too cold outside, he says. Eve likes the cold, she volleys back. She doesn’t!

Eve likes  _ her. _

But Villanelle leaves the door untouched, it’s not a place for things like her. She much prefers the way Eve looks when she leaves the glow of safety and crosses the threshold out into the dark, crosses the sinister space of her yard into Villanelle’s barely-beckoning hands.

She doesn’t have to beckon, Eve goes willingly. It might be Villanelle’s finest work yet.

“Why don’t you ever come inside?” Eve asks her when she’s safely made it to the willow’s drooping shade. Villanelle doesn’t answer, just catches her fingers and spins her around in an awkward pirouette Eve barely fights against. “I leave the door open.”

“I don’t need doors.”

“Do you need an invite? Like a vampire?”

“What’s that?” Villanelle asks without really caring. It’s one of Eve’s likes: explaining things, speaking with her and being spoken to in turn.

“You don’t know?” Eve’s mouth twists doubtfully, afraid she’s being teased. It’s not unfounded, but Eve knows many things that Villanelle does not. Knows as truths. She collects them like mantlepiece dustibles, though Villanelle’s assured her they’re of no use. Nothing is  _ true _ so much as it’s  _ understood to be _ , which is a very thin thing to put weight on. “Long teeth, red eyes, creatures of the night. I thought you might be one for a moment.”

“Like this?” Villanelle asks and shows her these things in a very sporting gesture.

Eve buffets the back of her hand lightly into Villanelle’s stomach. “Why don’t you come inside?”

“Why would you want that?” Villanelle laughs.

“It’s cold out here. I don’t like the cold.”

“ _ I’m _ cold,” Villanelle reminds her, demonstrating by running dulled nails and fingertips the length of Eve’s jaw from ear to chin. Eve’s gotten bolder, nothing gives her away when she keeps Villanelle’s red gaze through the ordeal and maybe,  _ maybe _ Villanelle’s gained an appreciation for thrill too. They do push boundaries, the two of them. She’d never thought to look for it in such common places, in such common creatures, but she’d been told not long ago by a sad man drinking bottom-shelf scotch after he’d come home to find his wife packed, gone, and remarried, that  _ life is full of surprises. _ And his certainly was, for the rest of the evening anyhow.

Eve is a painting that shines in sharper relief, in more loving detail the closer you look. Villanelle hasn’t quite finished looking yet, she supposes. Common, but not without value.

Eve doesn’t shiver as Villanelle touches her. Instead, she reaches out and knots the awful scarf more snugly under Villanelle’s chin. “But I like you.”

“Then keep me out here,” Villanelle hums, tapping her finger against her own temple like,  _ I know things too _ . “You’ll like me better that way.”

And she hopes to leave it at that.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Of course, Eve is very bad at leaving things.

She’s not comforted by promises and platitudes, she’s not warmed by  _ so it goes. _ Villanelle’s word means nothing so why has she given it? Another motive Villanelle’s never thought to question until Eve does.

“I can’t keep you out, so you might as well come in,” she grumbles.

“You want me inside with your warm lights and your cozy little houseplants and soft quilts? You want me inside with your boring husband who loves you all the wrong ways?” Villanelle smiles wide, long incisors sitting funny in her mouth, but it makes Eve laugh  _ every _ time. “How do I fit there? I don’t even know how you fit there.”

“Hey,” Eve snips, nose turning up. “Leave my boring husband out of it.”

Villanelle prefers to, generally.

But she sees him more,  _ considers _ him more. An unfortunate byproduct of liking Eve.

He’s a boring bag of meat, spends a lot of time over a gas burner and the rest clinging to Eve like a bur. Villanelle’s come to associate the husband with the nights Eve doesn’t leave her glowing little home. The nights she’s not lured.

He is like, eh...a condition. A condition that Eve is suffering from, but Villanelle is polite about this affliction more often than not.

“I do not understand why you would do a thing like that,” Villanelle admits. She’s eyeing Eve sideways as they walk along the riverbank taking the long way home from her work. Eve always takes the long way home with her no matter the fights it instigates with the waiting husband.

Eve quirks a brow. “A thing like what?”

“The husband. The having of him. Him in general.” Villanelle mirrors Eve’s expression in a mocking sort of way.

Eve hums a laugh like Villanelle is being silly. “Why wouldn’t I? You might not get lonely, but I do.”

“Are you lonely now?” Villanelle asks, perturbed. She turns as they walk, gliding effortlessly in front of Eve while they match mirrored steps, Villanelle placing heels backward while Eve places toes forward. “Am I not interesting enough for you, Eve?”

“You’re very interesting,” Eve says patiently, slipping sideways and skirting around Villanelle as she keeps walking.

Villanelle watches Eve walk away from her for a moment, before skipping a few steps and coming up over her shoulder, walking in the footsteps she leaves behind her. “Is  _ he _ interesting? All he does is make mashed potatoes and lock me out.”

Eve stops abruptly and Villanelle bumps into her gently. When Eve turns, her expression is strange, consternated and considerate at once while she looks up at her. “You’ve been gone for months, you know? Sometimes it’s days, but other times it’s months. This time it was  _ months. _ ”

Villanelle frowns, head cocked to the side. “Is that long?”

Eve shakes her head fondly and pushes against her stomach so Villanelle sways. “It’s all long. When you like someone, it’s all long.”

“I am not someone _. _ ”

“You are to me,” Eve shrugs. “And maybe it doesn’t make sense to you, but he’s never gone long and I never have to miss him.”

Villanelle puffs up, digging her hands deeper into the vast well of her coat pockets as she studies Eve’s face. It’s so thin, the things Eve loves him for.  _ Never gone. _ It’s such a simple thing, but it’s not a thing Villanelle can want or do so maybe Husband is a more formidable distraction than Villanelle gave him credit for. This condition Eve has, more chronic than she supposed.

“I don’t have to be gone long,” Villanelle finds herself lying, like she has to defend it. She doesn’t even know what  _ long _ is, but she can be anything so she can be  _ short. _ “I can give you anything you want. Things better than  _ always here. _ There’s nothing I can’t give you - you’ve seen it, though you’ve fought me on it. You won’t even care if I’m here, you’ll want for nothing!”

And as she says it, she thinks why not? Husbands are common creatures, Villanelle is  _ uncommon _ and there’s nothing Eve likes so much as  _ uncommon. _ The idea that she could be bested by something as unoriginal as that winds her up, wobbles the delicate facade of beauty she wears and Eve only has the courtesy to look vaguely apologetic.

“It’s more than that. It’s not about wanting or needing or the things you give.  _ Love _ . You don’t understand,” she says sympathetically of all things.

Villanelle glares, loosens her hold on the veneer of normalcy as it niggles something angry and vicious in her chest and spills out on her face. “Love? It is not so much more. I can wear anything I like, even  _ that. _ I can even wear  _ him _ if that is what you want. I can be anything.”

Eve shakes her head and Villanelle could eat her for it, swallow her whole and carry her around so nobody can have her, not even the husband who stays _. _ “I don’t want anything,” Eve whispers, she has learned much of cruelty in Villanelle’s clever company if you look hard enough.

But Villanelle  _ is _ want, it’s her skin, her blood, and if she has a heart, it’s that too.

Eve’s standing there being cruel and clever and she’s not afraid of Villanelle. It’s a beauty Villanelle’s yet to see in such an ugly species. Eve doesn’t want anything and Villanelle can’t lure a thing that doesn’t  _ want. _

“You don’t want me?”

Eve frowns, sighs wistfully. That’s answer enough, but she’s not a thing of sweet words and glancing truth. She always sinks her teeth in. “You don’t get it. That’s not - it’s not about - I don’t want  _ anything _ .”

What does that mean? Anything is anything, of course she wants it.

“I like you and not because you’re anything.”

Villanelle lets out a choked little laugh, she really doesn’t understand. Anything is anything! Anything is husbands and books and drive-ins and everything Eve likes! What more is there?

It must be a thing shown and not explained, Villanelle determines, so she sways downward, one last temptation. She’s kissed a thousand humans and she’ll kiss a thousand more to get what she wants, she can be irresistible and  _ she can be anything. _ Her eyes darken as she brushes two fingers underneath Eve’s trembling jaw, one final lure.

“You can’t possibly like me just as I am, because you’ve not seen me as I am,” Villanelle murmurs, staring down Eve’s eyes as though she might see straight through to the bottom. “I don’t mind. I don’t care what you like, I like you.”

“I know,” Eve breathes and her teeth clench so hard Villanelle feels it under her fingertips. “What I  _ mind _ is that you think you’re not what I understand you to be. You’re selfish and you think I’m stupid. You think you can paint me pictures and pretend I see nothing of the artist standing behind them. I’m not stupid, you’re just not  _ anything _ . I wouldn’t like you if you were, and I certainly wouldn’t  _ want you. _ ”

Ah, the lady  _ knows. _ She knows! “You have it all figured out,” Villanelle agrees and they’re speaking so close, there can’t be much more than Villanelle’s breath in Eve’s lungs. “Fine, I’m not  _ anything _ . I’m this and I’d like to kiss you.”

“Why?” Eve challenges.

“Because I’m no good. Because I want you and I like you,” she scoffs. “What else is there?”

When Eve doesn’t back down, Villanelle thinks she’s won. So strong is her conviction, that she leans forward until she’s stopped by a single delicate finger against her lips. “I’m only supposed to kiss one person at a time. And I’d like to kiss someone who can love me,” Eve says solemnly.

Villanelle’s teeth press to Eve’s finger as a sinister grin splits her lips open. She is sure of it then: there is nothing like Eve, nothing so resiliently ordinary. “I’m not a person.”

“You can’t tell me what to know.”

And maybe, just maybe, Villanelle believes that. “Isn’t that something?” She chuckles, tucking her chin into the warmth of her tightly knotted scarf and stepping back. Her hands go back to her pockets and she continues backing away until she’s saved enough face to spin on her heel and leave.

It’s absolutely exquisite, the way she’s made to hurt. It may very well be the first time she’s ever felt anything like it, it’s like death, she thinks. Beautiful and messy and red.

  
  


____________________

xxx.

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i tried to come up with a sharp teeth emoji and managed this before i started laughing:
> 
> :E


	3. xxx.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for human science

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is my first halloween completely alone, such is the times. happy international day of monsters to anyone else who finds themselves similarly, you are spooky and resilient.
> 
> this isn't nsfw per se but it's...not advisable for work? nafw, shall we say. don't get excited...yet.

____________________

xxx.

____________________

Normally, Villanelle would consult Eve about these things, but Eve is the problem and she can’t help her now. Not without insult to injury. Not without potentially...terminable results.

Villanelle does seriously consider just eating her, being done with it. It’s a passing thought, serious and not serious at once, but she must admit it happens.

Who amongst us hasn’t considered evisceration to avoid embarrassment.

Instead, Villanelle takes her lead from Eve and conducts research of a sort. London isn’t thin on pretty women with wants and desires of the redder kind. She’s never had trouble seducing, enticing - want being a thing in large part sexual to nearly every species and that does not preclude Villanelle, for whatever complicated drives and ephemeral impulse drives her. Lust is  _ easy. _

Or it was. Eve has complicated matters.

Niko is a homely bit of mashed potato himself,  _ you are what you eat _ , so Villanelle has a hard time imagining Eve burns with passion for him. She considers it might be a problem of form - what Eve knows Villanelle to be, or  _ expects _ her to be, or perceives with comfort, is not a thing designed to lure one Eve Polastri. The Expectation of Villanelle that belongs to Eve is a thing built for a handsy investment banker on whim and inspiration, seductive sure, but in specific ways for a specific man.

The Expectation of Villanelle isn’t a thing Villanelle ever felt she needed to control until it was cast in stone and subsequently rejected. If Eve dislikes Villanelle as a fluid form, if she’s wedded to this  _ expectation _ , Villanelle has only that to work with. This expectation, this form, this “truth”. This impeccably crafted lure for the wrong damn person. Eve’s expectations ruin everything, as usual.

The problem of form is thus considered. If she’s stuck this way, she must collect evidence, she must determine if it lacks desirability or if Eve is being a clod.

Eve’s Villanelle doggedly pursues every eligible, ineligible and unqualified bachelorette that crosses her path. She has four in assorted pub bathrooms, twelve in their homes, one in a dressing room, two in alleyways, and presumably more that have failed to make the barely memorable collection. The Expectation of Villanelle, as it turns out, is one of her finest works,  _ as she suspected. _

Rather than leaving her victorious, it actually serves to rub her raw - each woman who has no problem wanting her, no problem panting for more, no problem spreading themselves, parting for her tongue and her hands and her clinical desperation to consume enough of them to  _ prove. _ She has to prove!

She’ll have time later to figure out  _ what _ she’s proving!

Pub Bathroom Number 3 grips the sink and grunts obnoxiously, but her eyes roll in a pleasant kind of way, like she’s in the throes of something violent and that has its own delights. Humans are easy to tune, always the same four notes more or less. “Have you ever had better?” Villanelle demands of her, holding her down with one hand at the base of her spine.

“No!” The woman screams,  _ duly noted. _

Alleyway Number 1 tugs on her hideous scarf too hard and kisses too much, even with one of her knees pushed nearly to her chest and her back scraping brick, almost too wet for Villanelle to get enough traction to tip her into ecstasy She says her husband doesn’t kiss her anymore. “This is why the having of the husband is useless!” Villanelle growls and doesn’t receive much in the way of scientific evidence from the woman’s wailing. But she certainly doesn’t deny it.

Data.

Bedroom Number Twelve comes quietly, hardly asks for anything and sleepily bats away Villanelle’s perfunctory attempts to stop her from reciprocating. Most don’t care what they give as long as they get. Villanelle finds herself tired, so she takes the domineering softness she can’t fight off. She hasn’t killed anyone in what must be  _ long _ and it makes her feel thin, overworn. What’s the harm in enjoying herself.

When all’s said and done, Bedroom Number Twelve treats her nicely, without expectation and with a knowing look when Villanelle sighs pleasurably, releases with more relief than she anticipated. “You’ve got to tell her,” she says later, attempting to light a cigarette and flicking through her phone as she curls naked over one knee propped to her chest.

Villanelle frowns.  _ That _ has never been true.

“Whatever girl you went and fell in love with? Yeah, you’ve got to confront that. It’ll eat you alive, you know,” she mumbles around the filter as she clicks, clicks, clicks for a light that doesn’t come.

Villanelle sits bolt upright and stares intently at Bedroom Number Twelve’s delicate back. “I don’t  _ love _ .”

“Right. If I had a dime...” she dangles with a little scoff.

“I would never do something like that,” Villanelle counters. “And I would know if I did.”

“I think we’re always the last to know.”

It’s a daunting notion, to be sure. Villanelle chews sharp teeth into her lip and frets, which is a bit of a new feeling. “If I...did that,” she allows, one finger held up. “Which I’m not saying I did, because I didn’t and I can’t and I will not - but If I  _ was _ : how could I possibly be the last to know? I cannot love and be ignorant of it.”

She laughs once, sharp, and her cigarette finally catches. “Oh yeah? Honey, loving someone isn’t something you do. It’s something someone does  _ to you. _ ”

And in that, Eve’s treachery reveals itself. Villanelle curls around her own knees and stares with wide, red eyes into the dark corner of the twelfth bedroom. Villanelle is flawless and beautiful and everything a person could want, even just in this  _ expectation _ Eve’s grown of her, this form. She’s proven it. With human science.

So Eve must also perceive her as flawless and beautiful and everything she should want, but it’s not enough. Whatever the case, Eve doesn’t  _ want _ . She already  _ has _ , Villanelle is mere gruesome fascination to her, something to put on her mantle. And for what?

For Villanelle to think of her always? For Villanelle to fuck a hundred women trying to prove she’s an inimitable kind of desirable, the only thing she should ever want? For Villanelle to swallow herself whole for scraps?

For Eve’s  _ entertainment _ ?

Villanelle’s afflicted with the need to  _ have _ , sick and starving, she’s poisoned herself with this want she makes games of and it’s poetic, just, maybe even a little bit delicious in the way all good tragic irony is, but it pulses ugly in her chest. Villanelle doesn’t like to lose, least of all her own games.

Eve’s done a very evil thing, if fine work is to be recognized between colleagues:

she’s made a thing she’s incapable of loving love her.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  
  


Villanelle studies Husband in ways she hadn’t before. And it’s true what Eve’s said to her, he doesn’t do anything more extraordinary than stay. He doesn’t gift Eve with much of anything but his company and the constant spotlight of orbital affection as she moves about in their warm little house. It’s  _ nothing. _

But it’s everything to Eve and humans really are such illogical, prehistoric little bugs.

Watching becomes a bit of a compulsion, then a bit of an obsession, then a poisoned kind of interest that manifests in much darker moments for the fragile souls that misfortune upon her company. It’s like an angry flush she can’t sweat out, no matter the screams she pulls from begging throats, no matter the horrors they imagine for her to puppet for them. She feels full with it, time bloated like decomposition as she grows to fit it, unnatural eyes wide open through long stretches of night to accommodate these things she needs.

And she does. Compulsion is  _ need. _

She watches Eve. She kills. Offal slips through gnashing teeth and it feels like waste in a way it never has.

Villanelle thinks maybe she learns how to hate this Husband.

She wonders how long it will take before she learns how to hate this Eve.

Eve carries on much the same. Her own little act of callous violence that Villanelle hates as much as she likes. Villanelle cannot  _ hurt _ , therefore Eve has not caused hurt. She must believe that, she still keeps the backdoor unlocked and stands in the garden looking disappointed every time Villanelle doesn’t show herself. Villanelle feels like she’s choking on a barb split through her chin, hooked and gleaming as it protrudes from her gaping mouth, wriggling helpless on a weighted bobber. Irony, as it turns out, tastes much like the inside of her mouth.

Just desserts, possibly.

This isn’t interesting or fun or really much of anything, it just  _ is. _

And it continues to be as Villanelle stews,  _ loves _ , apparently. It makes her quite sick.

Whatever passes must be  _ long _ , since Eve begins talking to Villanelle like a soliloquy to an empty theatre. She can’t know Villanelle is there, because, in an indecipherable way, she isn’t, at least not to Eve. Eve speaks nonetheless, waxing between sad and annoyed and frustrated and earnest depending on the night.

One night, Eve says nothing at all. She stands there with a cup of tea and looks sadly at the willow and holds her tongue so long Villanelle feels it like a retractor splitting her open. Is this  _ months? _ It feels like months, maybe.

Finally, finally, Eve says, “I know you’re there.”

“No you don’t,” Villanelle pouts.

Eve sips her tea and turns her head, looking right where Villanelle isn’t - shouldn’t be - but...also, is. “Where have you gone? I’ve upset you, haven’t I?”

“I’ve been fucking many women. For human science.”

Eve chokes on her tea, then politely coughs into her fist and nods with wide eyes like,  _ oh yes, fine hobby, that. _

“You’ve told me what I’m to be to you, so  _ fine _ .” Villanelle harrumphs and lounges back against the tree she takes shelter under. “And you’re wrong. Women want me, can’t get enough of me - even just like this. I may not be  _ anything _ , but what I am is perfect, despite your best efforts.”

“What’s upset you?” Eve asks.

“If I was upset, you’d already be dead,” Villanelle hisses.

Eve turns in place, searching among the darkness. “Let me see you. You’re being childish.”

And wouldn’t that be a thing? For Eve to  _ see _ her, not as she expects or knows Villanelle to be, but as Villanelle expects or knows herself to be - see the thing she’s trapped with her bumbling snare. If you can’t cut the cord or cut it’s throat, you shouldn’t be trapping. You should be food _. _

When Villanelle gives in, it’s not gentle. She’s terrible to look at, she’s made sure of it. The worst parts of every crawling beast and towering nightmare and unnatural unholy monster you can dream in the dark emerges from the shadow, because if Eve doesn’t want anything, then she can have  _ this. _

Eve’s shoulders jump a bit when she sees her,  _ really _ sees her without the pretty face and soft hair and gentle touch. She’s turned these things down and this is what’s left. Expectation dashed, form warped from lovely to unspeakable. Her eyes are wide to take it all in, fascination and horror in equal turn. But when she’s had her fill, she just seems tired. Sad.

“Don’t sulk, it’s unattractive,” Eve chides her. “You don’t get to try to seduce me for fun, then get mad when I’m not stupid enough to fall for it.”

Villanelle bares every set of teeth she’s conjured, slams limbs in a flexing pounce and roars right in Eve’s human face until Eve has to shut her eyes to weather the storm. She’s small in the cradle of Villanelle’s form, surrounded by claws and spittle and the unimaginable, but she stands in the faces of it.

When Villanelle’s heaving over her, panting and growling and waiting, Eve blinks her eyes open again and looks down at the cup in her hands. The tea ripples just slightly with the barest tremble, but she stills it by holding it to her chest before looking up at Villanelle again.

“What’s wrong?” She asks, but the answer is one thing Eve could do without. It won’t look pretty sitting on her mantle. She’ll hardly be able to look at it at all, it’s an ugly, ugly thing. Maybe not truth, but something understood to be, and sometimes that’s as close as we ever get.

Villanelle throws it at her feet anyways, she’s upset her so.

“You tricked me -  _ you did this! _ You made me  _ love _ you!” Her eyes burn down into Eve’s, daring her to say the wrong thing. If Eve has ever liked her, she’ll take it back. She’ll release her from it.

Eve shakes her head, denies it. She can deny it all she likes, but she’ll have to make a choice. Cut, kill, or run. “You don’t…” she shakes her head harder, eyes worried. “How? Do you even know what that means?”

Villanelle leans in, folds over her. “It means you’re  _ mine _ .”

Pity, of all things, turns Eve’s mouth down in a grimace and she at least has the good grace to look away. She’s genuinely apologetic when she next speaks to the ground. “No. It’s much worse.” A chanced look upwards from Eve tells Villanelle all she needs to know, riddles guessed before scripted lines. Eve says it anyways, she always does. “It means you’re  _ mine. _ ”

Villanelle shrinks from her with a noise like a wounded beast and flees.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


Villanelle knows exactly what she’s looking for when she crashes about London in the soft, tender part of the night Eve likes, when the only thing that outnumbers the people are the secrets. She’s barely anything by the time she finds what she needs, vestigial bits of savagery and inhuman wreckage wrapped in purpose.

She sees a couple kissing in a park, eyes swallowing more of each other than of the fat, full moon and Villanelle means to make a mess of them. Her intent from the beginning is to paint the glowing hillside with their sloppy red insides, mixed medium, romantic in her own way. Blended like oil paints as they stick and clot in the blades of green, green grass until frequent London rain washes them into the dirt and feeds the earth.

She means it, she does.

But in the face of fear, they grip each other harder and Villanelle thinks she can pull every bit of them out of their soft skin, but she’ll never be able to pull this from them. If they’re worms, than she’s not much more than dirt.

Villanelle falters, fumbles.

Wretched, wretched Eve. Clever master of games Villanelle’s been playing and winning since before her first ancestors were even intended. Even now, Villanelle  _ wants her. _

So Villanelle lets them be. The grass goes hungry another day, the mural unpainted, just another of life’s small little tragedies.

  
  
  


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The rest of her is shed behind like clothes scattered across a bedroom floor, shed until there's hardly anything. All that’s left is what could almost pass as a girl, crouched on her toes, chin on her knees while she watches the river push up to nudge against the toes of her shoes. It slips politely into the soft leather and makes itself at home.

Villanelle sighs and rolls her head to the side so her temple can rest and she can close her eyes a moment. She longs for simpler times, a thing that acts without being acted upon.

It was perhaps too much to ask. Luck, even for one so evolutionarily favored as herself, does not shine warmly upon those who expect to take forever without being taken from.

Love! How absurd.

Villanelle laughs dryly, but it warms a bit as she gets used to the notion. Fine, Eve wins, she can do what she likes with her.

Nobody likes a poor sport.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


Eve’s alone in her bed when Villanelle crawls up from under it, out of the shadows there and into the distant, stinging incandescent glow filtering in from the lit duplex next door. It’s a weak light, but it’s still light and it’s strange to feel it on her back when she slithers up under the sheets and settles close.

Eve stiffens and Villanelle knows she’s been sensed. All Eve has to do is turn from her side toward the divot where Husband usually sleeps. But Husband has probably never risen the fine hairs along her neck or churned like primitive dread in her stomach, not like she does.

Villanelle frowns and reaches out soft, human fingers to trace down the length of Eve’s spine until they run out of trail and she lets them rest. She’s the way Eve likes her best - barely inhuman, pretty, and Eve won’t even turn to see it. Maybe it’s not so good a disguise now that Eve’s seen it popped like a jack-in-the-box spook. Villanelle hopes not.

As moments pass, Eve’s spine slackens and she breathes steadier. Villanelle stares in the dark and breathes steadier too. “Are you going to kill me?”

“No. It’s much too late for that,” Villanelle mourns. “You’re quite safe, I’m afraid. Despite your best efforts.”

Absurdly, Eve laughs a bit and the last of the tension bleeds from her shoulders. “How terrible.”

“Do you enjoy doing this to me?” Villanelle asks. It’s not that it’ll change much, but she has to know the game’s been fun or it wasn’t much of a game at all.

“Yes,” Eve admits.

Villanelle hums,  _ she knew it. _ Absolutely wicked dressed as prey. Immaculate deception.

Eve shifts on the point of her hip like she means to turn and face her, but Villanelle stops it by wrapping her forearm around her belly and curling around her, cold hands to sleep-warmed meat. Eve smells lovely.

“You’ve caged an awful, awful thing,” Villanelle tells her, right behind her ear. She resists the urge to hold tighter, the urge to let her tongue from between her terrible teeth to  _ taste. _

Eve places a hand on Villanelle’s like she needs to keep her there with anything more than what she’s already done to her. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t start now. You’ve never been better.” Villanelle breathes a puff of humorless laughter against Eve’s delicate neck and presses the ghost of a smile there. “You must decide what you’ll do with me, then. I don’t keep well.”

“Okay,” Eve says softly.

Villanelle thinks of the way she plays with her own food and considers the idea of reciprocity for the first time in her long, long state of being.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Losing is much softer than she thought it'd be, for what that's worth. Eve is still Eve and Villanelle is still Villanelle and they are still them. Wanting without having is a survivable thing - like sea glass, the beating of time, however violent, only smooths and shines it. Eve won't live long enough to wear her to nothing anyhow, there's no real harm in a bit of gentle violence.

It's not much fun if you always win.

____________________

It’s been ages since Villanelle’s run into anything like her. They’re not social creatures, these things that live in your shadows. It’s just good sense not to share hunting territories, but here He is and there Villanelle is and they do reach a bit of an impasse where Eve is concerned.

Villanelle doesn’t even notice him at all, initially. He’s not much to look at, see.

It starts as an offhand remark when Eve mentions she believes she was followed home by an off-putting man and if Villanelle had much more to go on than that, she’d have probably said something better than, “Not many men who are  _ on _ -putting these days, are there?”

Which is perhaps a little insincere coming from her.

Nonetheless.

Eve doesn’t press the issue at first. She hasn’t pressed much of anything lately, she’s been quiet, frustratingly gentle like maybe she believes Villanelle to have feelings. Disgusting and insulting.

She just has an affliction, Eve doesn’t need to be weird about it. She will suffer love like the human skin rash it is: let it chafe a few days, try not to prod at it, and hope it goes away. Villanelle feels she’s been doused of her anger, just a sputtering little candle of want she can carry around without burning Eve too terribly. It’s not like she’s planning to eat her anymore, though it’s overstating the issue to say she’s developed a sense of decency overnight.

No, it’s much simpler, much more functional. She’d rather have Eve in half-measures than not at all. Such a fleeting thing, a person. Better to enjoy her while she lasts.

It does feel a bit like she’s following at Eve’s heels like a hound for table scraps, but what’s an indefinable nightmare to do about it. It’s not like she has a schedule to tend to.

Then Eve mentions the off-putting man again, how she’s seen him a dozen times over the last week with increasingly unsettling eye contact and a dread she can’t shake. “It’s like how I felt that first night I saw you.”

“And never again? I’ve lost my edge,” Villanelle says idly.

They’re in a park long past recommended closing, avoiding the husband who’s now begun to insist Eve is cheating on him. If only, if only.

“Are there other things like you?” Eve asks, a worried little crease between her brows.

It’s almost insulting to see Eve disturbed by this average looking  _ man _ in ways that Villanelle herself has never quite managed. The stalker, not the husband. Though Villanelle holds them in relatively equal regard these days. “There’s nothing like me,” Villanelle scoffs.

“I know,” Eve indulges, a head pat for the hound. It does nothing to wipe the pout from Villanelle’s lips, in fact it may very well make it worse. “I just…” She stares out into the liminal space between two trees leaning together, bringing the far part of the park deep into the black. “It gives me a bad feeling.”

“Are you trying to make me jealous?”

“I’m being serious.”

“Because it is working. It’s very sexy.” Villanelle gives her an encouraging nod as the toes of her boots press against the ground, giving her another push to rock in the creaking park swing. Eve remains still in hers, she’s just no fun at all. “Do you want me to kill him? Will that make you happy?”

“No...maybe...I don’t know.”

Villanelle purses her lips and tries to gauge Eve’s sincerity - her  _ feelings _ \- which she’s obviously been overwhelmingly successful with up to this point. “We can try it on for size? See how it feels?”

Eve sighs.

“Let me know. If I’m trapped here being enamored of you, I might as well make myself useful,” Villanelle mutters, dragging her toes loudly through wood chips.

Eve blushes a bit,  _ table scraps. _

  
  


______________________

  
  
  


It doesn’t come up again until Villanelle tries to hail Eve from across a street on her way home from work. She shouts reflexively in the wrong language when Eve veers and nearly gets flattened by a car in her rush to cross the street. The car slams on its brakes and Eve braces against the hood with a barely legible  _ sorry _ as she skirts the bumper and sprints the rest of the distance between them. Villanelle’s gesturing angrily, a remark about glass human bones on her tongue when Eve launches herself into Villanelle’s awkwardly hovering arms. Her hands twisted into the back of Villanelle’s coat tremble.

Villanelle agonizes about it for a moment, then carefully, strategically places one hand at Eve’s back and the other at her shoulder. That seems right.

Right?

“What is happening?” Villanelle asks curiously.

Eve pushes her palms into Villanelle’s chest and leans back to peer up at her with wide eyes. Without explaining much of anything, she cranes her neck back over her own shoulder, searching the sparse night foot traffic. “He was following me so closely, I couldn’t shake him and his - his eyes were completely black. I’m just…”

Villanelle’s brows lift, waiting for just what Eve is, but she only gets squeezed harder about the middle as Eve buries herself there again.

“I’m  _ really _ glad to see you.  _ Fuck.” _

Villanelle narrows her eyes as she looks out over the top of Eve’s head and catches the fluttering tail of a coat as a shape turns, slips between buildings and into darkness. He’s not so clever - she can smell it on him too, the familiar heavy iron and sickly wetness of his last meal.

Her nose presses once to the soft hair at the top of Eve’s head and she’s pleased to note she doesn’t smell Him there yet. As Eve unburies herself again, Villanelle paints a serene smile on her face, betraying nothing. “I thought you weren’t afraid of monsters.”

“Ha,” Eve laughs blandly, caustic but unable to shake the tremble of her hands. “I’ve made up my mind. You can kill him.”

Villanelle smiles and rolls her eyes. “You are so dramatic. There is nothing scarier than me. Come, I will walk you home.”

It’s Eve’s turn to pout, but what’s she pouting about? She’s the one who winds her arm through Villanelle’s and clings, while Villanelle hardly teases her at all. She would, of course it’s one of her favorite things, but she spends a good deal of the walk taking covert glances between all the little building wedges, crevices and gullies of a shadowed city like London, matching the glittering voyeur she sees there with every step. One message flashes in her eyes at every met glance:

_ Mine. Back off. _

  
  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


As far as Eve is concerned, she’s dropped off to a pleased Husband at a reasonable hour for the dinner he’s cooked her, safe and sound. Locked doors, locked windows, drawn curtains, burrowed closer to snoring Husband than she might normally be, if only for the safety of a heavy arm over her and shared dreams.

Or whatever.

Villanelle lets herself in quietly, because whatever masquerades as safety certainly doesn’t protect their home from something like her and it won’t protect them against something like  _ Him. _

She stands silent at their bedroom window, ignoring the way Husband winds himself around Eve behind her, the way he has what she doesn’t. Ungrateful prick.

At the window, she watches the dark of the backyard into the deepest part of the night. She watches until she sees Him there, wearing as average a skin as he could’ve managed,  _ ugh. _ No imagination, whatsoever. He’s just a middle-aged, schlubby stock of man in cheap clothes with a lumpy face. He looks up at her and blinks, cocking his head to the side curiously.

Villanelle glares down at him without blinking at all. Her breath doesn’t disturb the cold glass even as she leans closer and puffs up with clear intent.

He doesn’t come in that night. Eve and Husband slumber, unaware as Villanelle keeps vigil.

Villanelle thinks it’s probably too much to hope that He will retain the message she’s sent him if she’s to turn her back even for a moment.

_ Do not touch. _

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


Villanelle’s not crossed paths with Another in what certainly must qualify as  _ long _ . None of these crossings were more than a tipped hat, turned heels, and as much distance between each other as they could establish. To Villanelle’s understanding, they’re solitary. Like bears, but without the hormonal imperative to fuck once a year. Thank god.

His confusion has bought her time, but it won’t buy more than a night. Villanelle knows hunger and she knows the hunt and Eve has a certain inescapably fraught damsel quality to her, no matter what she might think of her own fortitude. So it’s not surprising she’s being stalked, it’s just annoyingly improbable.

Villanelle’s tried in as many nonverbal ways to tell the interloper to take his ugly face and piss off, but it hasn’t worked so here they are.

She watches Eve leave her work, steps quick and choppy against the cold and her own worry as she checks her back over and over and over again. As she rounds a corner, he slips into the corner of her vision.  _ Ooooh _ , very spooky.

Villanelle rolls her eyes.

It’s not difficult to cut him off, step in his sneaking path as he tries to cut between buildings on Eve’s heels and then it’s just them.

He considers her like he had the night before, head tipped to the side and expression blank.

“That’s mine,” Villanelle opens negotiations. “Go get your own.”

He frowns like she’s put something gross in his mouth. “Why is it still alive then?”

“I like it that way.”

His genuine befuddlement is noted and shared, she’s just had more time to sit with it. “Why?”

“She’s nice to look at and she’s funny to have around. Why don’t you mind your own business?” Her shoulders bunch up around her ears as she bristles, tiring of his beady little black eyes and general ugliness. This is why none of them have social calls.

He shakes his head at her, if you can imagine that. Shakes his head, of all things. “If you won’t have it, I will. I’m not leaving it so you can play around with it.”

“No,” Villanelle says simply. She can shake her head too, watch. It doesn't do anything. “No, you won’t be doing that. I’ll eat you. I really will, ugly little cretin.”

“I’m bigger than you,” he warns her like that means anything either.

Villanelle grins at him, holds her hands out wide, allowing him a moment to take her in. “I  _ want it  _ more _ , _ ” she promises him.

And she does, he just doesn’t learn it in time.

  
  
  


________________________

  
  
  
  


Nobody sees much of anything these days, or a passerby might have spotted the grotesque shadow of the Unimaginable swallowing the Unspeakable whole, unhinged and choking as it tried to crawl violently from the pit of her stomach, screaming and terrible. They might have seen the way it sickened her and bled from between her teeth and yawned wide in her stomach like a chasm. The way it made her  _ hungry. _

But nobody really watches, do they?

  
  
  


______________________

xxxx.

______________________

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :E <3


	4. xxxx.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> just who is "Her" anyways?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> international day of monsters has passed, but i celebrate daily. privately.

______________________

xxxx.

______________________

  
  
  
  


Eve isn’t nobody, though. They’ve tried that on and it never quite fits the way you’d want it to.

Eve watches, of course, she just can’t help herself. Normally it’s nice, a bit of a tickle Villanelle doesn’t care to brush off.

But she’s standing there in the mouth of the alley looking like an entire meal herself, watching Villanelle sag into the brick, holding the torn half of her face and choking as He scrabbles at her insides, dissolving into her in a horrible, shared mass of agony.

“Are you okay?” Eve frets, gasping like she’s out of breath.

“I’m fine,” Villanelle assures her.

Then she has to catch herself on her knees as she crumples forward to vomit a torrent of black sludge into the filth of the London street.

Ugh. She swallows hard against the roiling back of her throat, shivering at the taste as it splashes against the flat of her tongue, between her jagged teeth. Fatal indigestion and the incredibly rude gesture of clawing half of her favorite face off, to name some of his final crimes. If there’s any justice, he suffered terribly.

Villanelle looks up in time to watch Eve tiptoe closer, never very good at the things that are good for her. That brings a different kind of agony to the surface as she smells her, can practically feel her pulse like tenor in her teeth and it makes her want to sing.

“Don’t!” She grits out and it comes out in an unsettling warble of voices.

Eve finally, finally listens to her.

“Don’t,” Villanelle says again as she closes her eyes and closes her teeth around more of the foul bile, forcing it to spill out the corner of her pinched mouth. If she focuses on the pain in her guts and the burn in her throat, she doesn’t have to focus on the way Eve’s little pinprick life shines like a fucking oasis, warbling sparkling mirage in the desert - god the hunger.

She’s miscalculated, He’s like a cosmic vacuum in her stomach and she needs-

Eve edges closer.

Villanelle whips her head toward her and hopes it looks as ghastly as it feels, enough to stop even Eve in her brave little tracks. “I’m very hungry right now,” she warns in a low, dissonant voice. “Please leave.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Eve asks in a breathless voice, wringing her hands and wobbling to and fro on her toes as she fights her own inertia. “Are you okay?”

“I”m great,” Villanelle snaps before He gives another thrash and she has to bend to purge violently again, black against the fine leather grain of her shoes. “Just...great.”

“Let me help you,” Eve insists, creeping forward another few steps. “He hurt you, didn’t he?”

“I hurt Him,” Villanelle growls. “I told you to stop!”

As always, Eve looks fascinated. Sick and thrilled, isn’t that cute. “I didn’t think you could...hurt. He was like you, wasn’t he?”

“As much as anything could be,” Villanelle grits out. She’s trying not to picture the way Eve might taste, but it’s an unnecessary politeness. What’s the harm in a bit of imagining? Window shopping, as it were? “And I hurt, you manage it just fine,” she adds, a bit vindictively.

“Why didn’t you tell me? You knew what he was.”

“I do enjoy lying.”

Eve puffs out her cheeks with an angry flush and pushes her coat sleeves higher toward her elbows and then she’s getting closer again.

“Don’t! Do not - come closer!” Villanelle demands haltingly, she feels compulsion jerking at her neck like a leash and could cry for the frustration of it. “ Would you care to be eaten, Eve? I’m having a hard time remembering not to do that, okay? Go home to Husband. He won’t eat you.” She hiccups and has to cover her mouth a moment. But the joke is right there, so she lifts her fingers away and manages to add, “Not even the way you’d like him to,” before heaving again.

Eve rolls her eyes and takes another few steps so she’s within snatching distance, stupid Eve. “Let me help you, please.”

Villanelle doesn’t - she wouldn’t - but she’s also too busy turning inside out to do much to stop her. She feels Eve rest a hand against her curled spine and squeezes her eyes shut hard enough to see spots of light. “Please go,” she begs.

Eve can’t, though, it’s much too late. Villanelle’s grabbed her by the wrists and straightened to sway over her hungrily. Eve still doesn’t have the good sense to look scared. “What do you need?” She asks.

“Do not ask me that right now,” Villanelle grinds out through aching teeth. “I need to do awful things. You tempt me so.”

“I’m sorry,” Eve says sincerely, as close as they may ever get to that. “Thank you for saving me...again.” She rolls her eyes a bit - she’s fraught, Villanelle said so, she’ll come to terms with it someday. “I’ll take care of you, okay?”

“I’ll kill you, Eve. I really will.”

Eve laughs sweetly and works her wrists from Villanelle’s clutches, unhurried and unbothered. “Please don’t do that,” she asks politely, then guides Villanelle’s weary head down to rest on her shoulder, her stupid fragile human neck right at Villanelle’s teeth. Villanelle’s insides are eating themselves, and she finds she prefers that to the meal in front of her. They’re both very bad at being what they are, it would seem.

Eve braces an arm under Villanelle’s to take more of her weight as her energy flags and these are indignities that can only be suffered through, Villanelle supposes. Eve’s other hand cards through her hair once, then stills against her head.

Villanelle frowns. “You can keep doing that. If you want.”

Eve must want to, because she does.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


Eve takes her home. Stray hound, the metaphor thickens, she did warn you.

That’s about as far as Eve’s understanding of how to doctor something unnameable like her extends. Which, short of splitting her own belly for her, is as much as she can do.

This is all to say that Villanelle finds herself on a couch with a fluffy blanket wrapped around her head and shoulders, a compulsory cup of tea in her cold hands, and an inane program droning on the television. The heaving, the violent purging had subsided to sick little hiccups and the bucket of black sludge taken away, replaced by...tea. Whatever that’s supposed to do for her.

Her eyelids droop in a way she’s unaccustomed to, closer to human intoxication than human sleep, artificial and dreadful. It stands to reason something so toxically potent would struggle the whole way down and sit like acid. Reason just hadn’t played much of a role in the equation. There was Eve and there was not-Eve and consequence is just a side dish to that very simple choice.

Every nerve feels weak and sluggish all the way to her fingers as they grip weakly at the warm mug. If she weren’t resting it against her folded knee, she thinks it might slip from her fingers and roll across the floor. Her guts roil and she closes her eyes, focusing on the sound of Eve clinking around the kitchen behind her.

Dying is a rudimentary word for it, but it crosses her mind that she might be doing something like that. Dying implies a state of living and a state of not and she’s never really done either, so.

The purgatory of that little space between a flat hand wobbling on the axis of a wrist like, eh. Who can say, really.

Surely she’s too beautiful to die, though.

“What are you thinking about?” Eve asks, leaning over the back of the couch on her forearms and watching her swallow back the pulse of sickness.

Villanelle’s eyes heave themselves back open and she turns to meet Eve’s worried expression. “How pretty I am.”

“Why do I even bother,” Eve mutters. All she does is bother, why question it now?

There’s little fight left in her, not enough to stop her eyes from drooping shut. She hums and lets her chin tip forward a bit, her head feels much too heavy. Her consciousness skips, damaged and burnt out, so she startles a bit when reality catches up to her again. Eve’s adjusting the blanket under her chin, closing it tighter and watching her intently.

As she looks down, Villanelle realizes she’s grabbed Eve’s wrists again and releases them quickly. “Don’t sneak up on me, you know I eat people.”

“I know,” Eve smiles, she really is very demented.

Villanelle smiles too, a little sloppy in her weakened state. “Here I am again. Vulnerable in the lair of a monster. Remember: I could have let him eat you. You owe me.”

Eve laughs and reaches out a hand, swiping a gentle thumb along Villanelle’s cheek like she’s proving a point. “No you wouldn't have. You don’t share well. If I’m going to die, it will be only with your blessing.”

“You think I can control you?” Villanelle’s grin widens against her drowsiness.

“No,” Eve says and her hand is still there touching her face. “I think you care for me.”

“Now you’re being absurd.”

The front door swings open and Eve jerks her hand away a second too late. Husband stands there juggling his keys in one palm while he looks between Eve and Villanelle like he’s trying to remember if they’re supposed to have guests or not. His eyebrows dance between perturbed and confused.

Villanelle gives him a weak smile. “Hello Husband.”

  
  


_____________________

  
  
  


Husband stares and it’s just not as sexy when he does it.

He thinks she’s not staring back, but what he sees couldn’t fill a postcard, let alone the deep well of reality he’s peering down. She sees him alright.

He’s looking at her like she has three heads. And in the moment she certainly doesn’t, so he’s being a bit rude.

“Is she going to...join us for dinner?” He asks. Eve seems perfectly content to pretend the three of them aren’t in the same room, let alone the same awkward conversation. She’s chewing like it’s a nuanced hobby.

Villanelle picks up the remote and begins flipping channels, ignoring the scene at her back.

“No,” Eve says simply.

Villanelle smirks at the television.

Husband puts his fork down and she can feel the twitch of his eye like it happens against her skin. As far as human politeness goes, not laughing is about as close as Villanelle’s ever gotten.

“Are you going to...introduce us?”

Villanelle wonders just how much it takes for Eve not to say no again. And the look on Eve’s face as she glances between Villanelle’s profile and Husband’s wide, expectant eyes is a picture she’d hang on a wall.

Villanelle smiles slowly, unfriendly to the nth degree. “Are you?” She asks quietly.

Husband shifts nervously in his seat, he feels it a little - maybe a lot. The not-rightness of her. He doesn’t like her and that’s just good sense.

Eve’s mouth is slack and her face is blank.

“Well?” Husband demands and his hackles raise, rightfully so. He may be eclipsed in every way by Eve and everything she is and everything she isn’t, but Villanelle is still very, very hungry. He would do.

“That’s…” Eve’s mouth twists up in the corner as she stares into Villanelle’s dark eyes. “Her,” She finishes, barely audible.

“Her who?”

Eve doesn’t look at him, she’s too busy watching Villanelle. And he should get used to that, he has nothing she hasn’t seen before. He may have Eve, but he’ll never have Eve’s interest. She said table scraps, she didn’t say nothing.

Villanelle grins and raises an eyebrow, daring Eve to name her.

Tense moments slink by, sharpen Villanelle’s senses and crawl at her stomach until Eve’s expression relaxes and she turns back to Husband with a prim little look. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

Villanelle’s bark of laughter cracks the air like a spider fracture, a finger to faulted glass. Husband jumps visibly in his seat.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  


She sits on the couch afterward, listening to Husband upstairs begging and demanding in equal turn for Eve to put her out. Send her away, he doesn’t like her. He’s got such a terrible, terrible feeling about her and just who is Her anyways? What is going on? Why is Eve doing this to them?

These are good questions.

Villanelle still feels the snare around her neck, doesn’t thrash anymore for fear it’ll tighten to the point it chokes. But the waiting has given her some clarity, some control.

She’s not so certain she’s the only one trapped.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


Husband goes to bed and closes Eve on the other side of the door, so much for always there. Eve comes back downstairs, hair frazzled at her temples from where she’d been pulling at it. She clatters about the kitchen a few moments and Villanelle feels her eyes at her back over and over again.

The tea had long ago gone cold in Villanelle’s hands, but she still holds it. When Eve finally skirts the couch and enters Villanelle’s field of vision, the fight has left her. She dismantles herself until she’s nothing but folded legs and arms on the floor, back against the couch as she stares at the silent programming on the television.

Villanelle reaches out and curls a tress of hair around her finger, tugs on it gently. When Eve doesn’t react, she slides them forward and curls those fingers around the front of Eve’s throat, dragging them backward, slowly. Eve doesn’t flinch, the idiot.

“Her who, Eve?” She echoes teasingly.

“You tell me,” Eve sighs, chin on her folded arms.

Villanelle giggles and tugs a little harder on a soft piece of hair. She stretches her legs out over the seat so they fall on either side of Eve as she leans forward. “That’s not how it works.”

Eve peaks at her over her shoulder. “How does it work?”

“You name your monsters. I have never needed a name and I never will. But what will they say of Eve’s monster, hm? They’ll just call me Eve if you’re not careful. That’s what happens when you don’t name a thing, names are sticky like that.”

“They’ll say you’re annoying.”  
  


Villanelle hums thoughtfully and uses the opportunity to lean forward slowly, slowly as Eve’s breath hitches, until she can smack a quick kiss on Eve’s cheek, barely dodging the swat as she pulls back.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Eve falls asleep fretting, such little thoughts for such little things. She hasn’t even crawled from between Villanelle’s knees or even made it off the ground, she’s just keeled over. Villanelle remains perfectly still, allowing Eve to use her knee as an uncomfortable pillow as sleepy noises puff from between her lips. She doubts anything on this earth or another has exerted the kind of exacting control she has over the jagged carved chasm of hunger torn across her belly. Denial is a new kind of domination for her and it’s a violent way to shake some feeling loose from numb limbs.

Hours later, Husband comes downstairs slowly, eyes as wide as he can make them in the dark. The better to see her with, of course.

He won’t come too near, he doesn’t like her very much.

Villanelle smiles at him too widely and she wonders what colors he sees in her eyes, what ends. Imagination has almost put her out of work, it’s always worse than whatever she can conjur. Her hand lifts in a motionless wave. Eve sleeps.

“I want you gone in the morning,” he almost manages to command, but it quivers.

Villanelle knows it’s wrong when her smile widens, she lets it split past the point of acceptable. He’s so pale, getting paler.

“I will be,” she says honestly.

His eyes dart rapidly between Eve and Villanelle and for a moment, Villanelle wonders if he might try to lunge, might try to rip her away and run. She’d like to see him try.

Just to tease him, Villanelle reaches out and gently twirls a lock of Eve’s hair between two fingers and loops it a few times before releasing with a playful tug. He looks just shy of glaring, but he’s not brave enough.

“Don’t come back here,” he breathes hoarsely. She can smell his nervous sweat even across the room, but it’s a bit of a bore. She’s found much better ways to entertain herself than the short fuse high of cheap parlor terror.

Villanelle gives him an insincere, sad little look. “She will miss me terribly.”

His eye twitches and she wonders just what stories he’s invented about Eve’s newest obsession, just how he’s imagined the two of them behind his back. He conjures worse shadows than even she could puppet for him. “She doesn’t love you,” he grinds out and that’s entertainment.

Villanelle giggles quietly and stifles it into her hand so she doesn’t wake Eve. “I know. She loves you.”

His face twists up, gotcha.

Villanelle gestures flippantly and leans back on her arms, spread wide along the back of the couch like she’s lounging on a throne, Eve at her feet. “You have everything. So what does she get from me, hm? It must eat you alive.”

It must, he flees up the stairs with a weak little snarl. 

  
  


_____________________

  
  
  


She’s weaker the following night, it gets worse and she hopes that’s a witty predecessor to getting better. She’s still so hungry.

Eve seems surprised to find her moping about the backyard, paler than usual and sickly in a way she usually has better control of. She’s ushered inside again and Eve places a worried hand to Villanelle’s forehead before she reads the bemused expression on her face and snatches it back. “Sorry. I don’t know why I did that.”

“What is the diagnosis? Am I human sick?”

“I have no idea, you’re so cold,” Eve murmurs. “I don’t know what to do for you.”

Villanelle scoffs, slipping hands down Eve’s forearms from elbows to wrists. “Yes you do. Let me eat you. You look delicious.”

Eve rolls her eyes.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


She does, of course. Look delicious. It’s not Villanelle’s fault Eve isn’t afraid, she’s done her very best.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


They wind in and out of a string of nights, tucking Villanelle away into dark corners of the house to hide her from Husband. She’s become the monster under the bed. Eve touches her a lot and Villanelle wonders if she knows you’re not supposed to put your hands all over the art.

Husband knows she’s there, he’s a wound ball of nerves and spitting, backhanded comments. He’s frayed like cheap cotton. He’s unraveling.

Eve doesn’t care.

She’s so bad, Villanelle could kiss her.

Several nights in Eve asks Villanelle to do something, anything to help herself. She asks her to kill. She asks her to be monstrous and that’s something Villanelle would hang on a wall, in a museum even.

“How depraved,” Villanelle teases.

Eve doesn’t tease back, she’s serious. They’re hiding in her little closet of a home office, both sitting on the carpeted floor with their backs to the wall underneath the lone window. Husband is angrily making mashed potatoes downstairs. The armistice persists until dinner.

“You’re getting worse,” Eve says quietly.

Villanelle gestures at herself, a hand held daintily to her chest. “Eve, I am already Worst. I cannot get worser.”

“He did something to you,” Eve plows ahead, quite immune to her charm that evening. “You’ve been hurt for days and you won’t do anything about it. I can’t watch you get sicker.”

“Watch something else, then. Watch Husband make mashed potatoes.”

Eve turns her head and gives her such a look. “I can’t watch anything else.”

It’s like she’s begging for something and Villanelle’s not really sure what. An end, a beginning, a middle, something like that. She’d like to give it to her, she promised she could give her anything, but she’s afraid of just what she’s asking with that look. Afraid! It’s a warm kind of feeling.

“I like when you watch me,” she decides to say.

Eve nods. “I like when you watch me.”

“You are in trouble, Eve Polastri.”

Eve’s head slides along the wall and thunks gracelessly onto Villanelle’s shoulder. She tangles her hands in the ends of Villanelle’s ugly scarf and holds her there, as long as she likes.

  
  


_____________________

  
  


Husband goes out of town, back to Poland, he needs to clear his head and there’s not much of a point to spending nights in a house with one bed you’re unwilling to share. And he knows Villanelle’s around, he can feel her like sharp nails on the back of his neck, no matter how Eve hides her from him. He doesn’t see, but seeing isn’t everything.

Eve seems relieved with him gone, even for the moment. She’s stressed, sleepless nights and tender worry. Villanelle can’t die, though, Eve has nothing to worry about. Dying is predicated on the notion of being alive and that’s just an awful obtuse way to look at the state of her.

She’s waning, fluctuating, languishing. And soon she will not. Or she will not be. Either way, an end to the state and an end to Eve’s worry.

She’s explained this of course, but it doesn’t relieve Eve the way she might have hoped.

“Why won’t you help yourself?” She demands, crouched at Villanelle’s sightline while she’s lying curled up on Husband’s side of their bed. It smells like him, unfortunately.

Villanelle gives her a peaceful smile. “What do you mean?”

“You’re hungry. Go make yourself whole again and come back to me. Do whatever you have to do.”

“You’re quite wicked, you know that?” Villanelle muses.

Eve furrows her brows, pinches her mouth, then nods once. Agreed.

“You’re awful invested in this thing you don’t love,” Villanelle points out and if all it’s served is to make Eve blush, then so be it. Intention well spent.

“I am.”

“People will talk.”

“They will.”

Agreed, then.

Eve strokes her hair some more, which she tends to do. It’s not a human medicine - Villanelle has checked - but she’s not invested in demystifying the gesture. She enjoys it too much.

“Please get better. You’ve offered me anything I want and I’ve decided what that is.”

“How can you want a thing but not want it to be yours? How can you want and want-not?” She shakes her head, confused, but as endeared as ever. “Just me, then, hm? Well and whole.”

Eve’s expression is jagged, torn, wonderfully clouded in conflict. “You, but not mine,” she confirms hesitantly.

This hesitation is where the both of them may live and die. Villanelle would certainly be willing.

“Fine,” She says airily. “I did promise.”

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Villanelle tears a man limb from limb in the dark of the underground, horrifying by virtue of desperation and not by any specifically conjured nightmare. Just...hungry.

He’s tasteless, hardly anything, leaves her hungrier than before he’d crossed her path maybe. But she can curl her bloody fingers into a fist and hold it, so it’s done it’s job in that sense. Hunger has always been a thing in her stomach, but as she crouches there in some poor nobody’s guts, she thinks it might just be a thing in her head. Wormed into whatever passes for a soul these days.

This is probably all Eve’s fault. It’s a safe bet.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


When Eve sees her next, she must look better than she had, the relief is palpable as Eve braces hands at the edge of her jaw.

“Are you better?” She asks with barely restrained eagerness.

Villanelle rolls her eyes. “No. I’m still the Worst. Do not worry.”

Eve is almost giddy in her relief - as much as any one Eve Polastri can be considered giddy. Husband is returning soon and Villanelle has the energy to do a turn about the neighborhood with her and stand about in the kitchen watching while Eve burns her dinner and chucks the lot. When Eve orders in and sits them at the table, Villanelle’s content to gnaw sore gums into the tension of an apple skin while Eve talks more than she eats.

Everything is right in Eve’s world. She seems happy.

Villanelle can’t help but feel fond for it, even as her gut yawns wider and her chest lurches with want. The Other is quiet, gone, but she fears the damage may have been done. We live with all kinds of things though, so she’s sure she can live with this. Want, hunger, rude houseguests the lot of them.

Not like Villanelle, she’s been perfectly pleasant as far as houseguests go. Hasn’t even eaten anyone’s husband, which should be noted and credited. And she drank the tea. It tasted like flower water.

“Do you still feel Him?” Eve asks when she’s abandoned the pretense of interest in her food. They’ve yet to find something that trumps the sway of Villanelle, which would warm her if that were possible.

Villanelle taps her chin and lies, just for fun. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Did you…” Eve’s eyebrows raise pointedly.

“Yes, Eve. I did.”

“So you’re not hungry anymore?”

Villanelle laughs through her nose and gestures vaguely with the nibbled core of her apple. “I am hunger, Eve. We should be worried if I’m not.”

“Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Dreadfully,” Villanelle says dramatically, then spreads her hands wide and leans forward across their efficient little dining table until she’s invaded Eve’s half. “I’ve come to enjoy it. Why do you think I spend so much time with you?”

And Eve does that thing she’s betrayed herself with increasingly over their acquaintance: she averts her eyes, she demures, she flushes, she fails to hide her want.

Food comes in many forms, itches can be scratched many ways.

Denial isn’t the nothing it purports. She’s gotten quite full off it, actually.

Eve stands abruptly and begins tucking leftovers away in her fridge, back turned while she gathers her pulse from galloping away, herds herself back in line. Villanelle twists the apple core between the axis of her pointer finger and thumb lazily and licks her lips from the dull, flat flavor of sweet.

Eve must know what’s happening.

Villanelle’s not even doing it to her, she’s just watching. Eve’s falling apart and she’s audience to it. She doesn’t have a monopoly on hunger, she’s just had so much more practice.

When Eve settles on the couch, so much closer to Villanelle than she should be, Villanelle wedges her elbow back against the headrest and puts her head in her hand, angling her body to study Eve languidly. “I’ll leave you alone, you know? I’m stronger, I’ll stay away from Husband and your warm house. My gift to you and yours.”

“I don’t-” Eve’s face pinches, that wasn’t what she wants.

And okay, Villanelle is fishing, but not very well. Eve’s just blind hungry, early-hours feeding in scarce season. Clumsy. Eve knows better, but she bites.

“You don’t have to go.”

“I don’t,” Villanelle nods. “But it’s nice to know you agree.”

Eve frowns, miffed at being caught so easily and Villanelle laughs. “I regret ever worrying about you,” she complains, grabbing up a pillow from her side and swinging it in Villanelle’s direction.

It’s slow, half-hearted, and Villanelle catches Eve’s wrist easily before she’s buffeted. It only serves to wind her up and soon she’s bringing her other hand around, clumsily trying to wrestle the pillow around while Villanelle catches her other wrist. Her body weight pushes forward and by the time Eve’s grappled and tried to have her way, she’s accidentally slipped over Villanelle’s thighs into her lap.

Then that’s where they are.

She’s breathing much too hard for their little tussle, but then so is Villanelle. She knows she’s lost control of the color of her eyes, but Eve’s lost control of the color of her cheeks, so they’ll call it even. Villanelle pushes her nails into the soft skin of Eve’s wrists and waits to see what she’ll do. Always from her lead.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” Eve whispers.

“Then don’t.”

The tendons in her wrists bulge against Villanelle’s fingers as her hands clench and she’s so close to her truth, Villanelle wants to rip it from her throat. “I don’t understand you.”

Villanelle’s smirks. “That must eat you alive.”

“Yeah, it really pisses me off,” Eve manages to squeeze between their mouths just before the space snuffs out entirely and her lips press to Villanelle’s so hard they feel each other’s teeth pressed through, carbon-printed like grave rubbings. Villanelle’s hands go slack and Eve uses the moment to escape her dazed grip and dig hands into her shirt like she’d fist her collarbones if she could. She should dig harder, bloody her hands and push right through Villanelle’s chest. She should make her feel it.

Villanelle thinks now she knows what being swallowed whole might have felt like. She’s more than willing to climb in, but the whip cracks and Eve jerks back, using her hold to push Villanelle away into the back cushion.

VIllanelle blinks, a little startled. Her hands have settled patiently at Eve’s thighs in the interim.

Eve blows out a long breath and goes through the many, varied stages of human grief right in front of her red, red eyes. But she still can’t look away. “Uh oh,” she breathes.

  
  
  


____________________

xxxxx.

____________________

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to the four of you interested in my existential wank, im actually having a great time, no matter how demented that sounds


	5. xxxxx.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> simple, formless french poetry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for entertaining this, its weirdly been my favorite. if you actually enjoyed reading it, that was purely coincidental. ive honestly stopped perceiving your perception of me, i have the awareness of moss on a log and the personal growth rate to match. its all downhill from here.
> 
> (p.s. please don't read this at work. or near your christian mother.)

____________________

xxxxx.  
____________________

Eve teeters there on the precipice of sanity, tightropes between the known and unknown for what Villanelle has come to appreciate as _long._ Time feels fuller still, something she used to skip like rocks on surf, but now wades through with blunt, fleshy human limbs.

Because Eve _deliberates_ and Villanelle is left holding her bag or something, chauffeur to this journey, at best. At worst, the pavement under slow meandering tire.

_Eh_ , like roadkill. Villanelle feels like roadkill, that is the joke.

She’s never been passenger to anything, though - certainly not without a fight - so there are gestures Eve must bat off from time to time. Flowers, silk, first editions, flattery, the persistence of Villanelle’s company.

“I need time,” Eve sighs, greedy, she never has enough of it. Villanelle has _endless_ time and it doesn’t feel like enough. But the ambiguous concept of reciprocation masquerades in an ominous, roundabout kind of way as an ending of sorts.

Is _having_ the end of it? The destination, as it were?

Villanelle’s _had_ , certainly - perhaps more than anything ever has. But in this, in Eve’s teetering, is Villanelle leading Eve to an end? The niggling feeling that she’s worried at all - could even consider such a little end in a world of many ends - probably forebodes of a different, larger kind of end. Not the kind of end waiting for soft little creatures like Eve, but rather for frighteningly inarticulable things like Villanelle herself.

Can she be nothing and something at once? Can she be _kept_ or is a good hunt only sporting if something dies at the end?

And when did she start thinking, particularly in such obfuscating logic as that content to rest upon the two-dimensional place of perceive and perceive-not? Her head hurts. Eve is being rude.

So she tries to think less - Eve does it all the time to little detriment.

_Time_ , nothing more than a third-wheeling piece of shit.

“What would you do with all the time in the world?” Villanelle asks her.

She expects a snippy answer like, _fit as much of it in my purse as I can, stuff the rest in my mouth if I have to_. Eve thinks she’s very clever and the worst part is that she is.

Instead, Eve takes a thoughtful, though no less frustrating route. “Find ways to shorten it, probably.”

Villanelle dips her chin to catch Eve’s eyes, just to be certain the sincerity with which they’re speaking. Sarcasm is a worse habit than spitting and humans do it more vigorously, more profusely.

Eve sees her look and shrugs. “Endless isn’t romantic, it’s terrifying.”

“Hm,” Villanelle nods, satisfied they’re speaking and not sparring. “Yes. It is like me. I suppose you don’t have to worry about anything endless, it’s a quandary only for endless things like myself.”

Eve spreads her hands demonstrably, she agrees, no use writing essays on it. Fine, they will speak in her terms.

“What if you didn’t have enough?” Villanelle flips it. “What would you do if you had just this one night?”

“I’d have to think about it,” Eve says, _ugh._

“No, no thinking!” Villanelle stops and Eve stops too. They’re blocks from Eve’s home and the waiting Husband and a night like every other night for Eve. Her life might as well be just one night, she doesn’t have time to think. Villanelle could take a moment to watch a passing circus and turn back to find Eve empty and full of worms, six feet under.

She laughs a dismissive kind of laugh and turns to keep going and Villanelle has had quite enough of time. She slips in front of Eve and swipes her bag, dangling it high above Eve’s head and bearing the brunt of an unamused look. “It might as well be that night, Eve. It’s right now or it’s yesterday, but it’s coming. This night and no more, what do you want?”

Eve’s expression turns thoughtful.

  
  


____________________

  
  


Villanelle feels she’s being mocked when Eve takes her to a fluorescent corner store for a six pack of some putrid dark ale and the neighboring, rat-infested pizza shop for a flat, limp pie. They don’t even go anywhere special. Eve sits them on a bench in the public way, twenty paces from a busker buzzing mournful little jazz improv ballads from a trumpet that looks like it’s been steadily chewed on for the last hundred years. Eve opens a beer with an opener on her keys, pushes her heels out until her legs straighten, and slouches back as she drinks.

Villanelle watches her curiously. Eve flips the cardboard top and folds a piece of sloppy pizza in half to feed it drooping into her mouth. Her toe bobs a little with the music.

“This is what you want with your one night?”

Eve shrugs. “It’s as good as any.”

“Is it?” Villanelle asks wryly, sticking her legs out to mirror Eve’s slouch. “I will help, you know? I can give you anything on your last day.”

“Well if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have paid,” Eve says peacefully.

Villanelle squints at her, sure she’s being made fun of, and draws her legs back in to curl over, prop herself as she studies Eve. “You are being unimaginative. Endless fine wines and the best chefs in the world. Candlelight and every wonder of the world, every scenic view from the Bolivian Salt Flats to the biggest canyons, tops of mountains. ”

“That sounds nice.”

“A thousand phenomena demystified, every sexual fantasy fulfilled, revenge for every indignity you’ve ever suffered, dark thoughts fulfilled and _anything_ , Eve. Anything!”

“Every sexual fantasy, huh?”

Villanelle narrows her eyes. “You’re mocking me.”

Eve smiles sweetly at her, then crams her mouth with more pizza. The trumpet warbles mournfully, schmaltzy and romantic and nobody throws him so much as a penny.

Villanelle watches her chew, swallow, settle with deliberate movements like she’s planning her next move. When she’s hoarded enough of this time for herself, she jerks her head toward the jazz trumpeter.

“What does he want?” She asks.

Villanelle glances over at him and back, shrugging. “Who cares?”

“You’re the expert. Allegedly.”

Villanelle sighs and gestures disinterestedly toward him. “Money, attention, to feel safe, to mean something. He wants to never have to talk again. And some days he wants to die.”

Eve shakes her head. “How can you tell?”

Villanelle grins and reaches out to push her finger against Eve’s forehead, just to piss her off. She gets swatted. “You _people._ You think you’re an endless spectrum when you’re really just a few shades.”

“Well what about her?” Eve asks, swaying her chin toward a woman in an expensive suit, leather portfolio tucked under her rigid arm as she strides purposefully past them, eyes focused ahead.

Villanelle hums and taps at her chin. “She wants other people to want her. She wants to be able to look down and see more people below than above her. She wants to hurt people and mean it. She wants to be alone.”

“So you know everything. Then why don’t you _tell_ _me_ what I want?” Eve concludes, crossing her arms. “Tell me and stop asking.”

“I think you don’t know how to want.”

Eve opens her mouth like there’s a smart little comment poised there, but a flash of perturbed amusement twists her face into something comical and she closes it again. She shoots a look to her side, only sparing a moment for Villanelle’s intent study of her. “Everyone knows how to want. We just don’t always know how to have.”

“I think you want to be free.”

Eve freezes with the lip of her bottle hovering by her mouth for a long moment before hiccuping back into movement and taking a long drink. “Maybe,” she agrees with a distant kind of smile.

Something dark - _darker_ \- niggles, twists and curls in Villanelle’s chest and she sighs ruefully. “Fine. Fine! Let’s call it off.”

“What?”

“Before you figure out how to have me. Or worse: how to _love_ me.” Villanelle gestures with an open palm and rolls her eyes. “Love isn’t freedom, Eve, you forget I live with it now. You won’t enjoy it at all, it’s a wretched preoccupation. Like tight pants.”

“What?” Eve laughs as Villanelle pulls her up to stand by both wrists. Her resistance is perfunctory, she wiggles a bit but Villanelle doesn’t relent. The beer is slipped out from her grip and set on the pavement, and then she’s whisked along in a clownish kind of dance. Swaying and the like.

Villanelle’s seen it, the doing can’t be that hard.

But there’s significantly more laughter than Villanelle’s come to expect from jazzy waltzes. The trumpet buzzes and warbles as their feet trip over each other and Eve’s laughter belays her complaints.

“Jesus, stop. People are staring.”

Villanelle spins her and has her foot trod upon for her efforts. “They can’t see us. Nobody really sees much of anything, do they? Not when they don’t want to.”

“Really?” Eve peeks over Villanelle’s shoulder, lifts herself on her toes with a gentle hand there. “What do they see?”

“What do you want them to see?” Villanelle whispers, conspiratorial.

“Nothing, I-” Eve mutters into her shoulder, she’s still peering over it like a battlement while Villanelle laughs quietly into her temple. “I don’t care. I want them to see us as we are, I don’t want to hide.”

“How are we?” Villanelle coaxes. “A monster and her prey?”

“You’re not a monster,” Eve defends weakly. A good joke, if nothing else.

Villanelle pushes closer to her ear, grin viscous. “I wasn’t talking about me.”

Eve’s hand slides from her shoulder to her quiet chest where her fingers sink into her wool coat, twist too hard to be kind, though her eyes are soft. “You think so little of me. I didn’t mean for this to happen, you know.”

“On the contrary, I seem to think so much of you that you may outgrow yourself. Your shadow looms larger than your shoulders!” Villanelle wraps a hand around Eve’s waist and presses her lower back close, closer to her own hips to force her into a low dip. “And _intention_ , dear Eve, isn’t a fault line upon which anything’s been shaken. You’re much more dangerous than imaginary demons like _intention._ ”

Eve stares at her mouth and _that’s_ intention, hm?

Villanelle licks her lips and bends forward, tempts her for that last bit of control. “But let’s not pretend you’re not pleased with the results,” she croons.

The slapped look on Eve’s face turns to indignation when Villanelle lets her hand fall a moment, feigns dropping Eve to the pavement. Her arms flail, constrict around Villanelle’s neck in her panic and she clings while Villanelle laughs. “Asshole,” Eve pants, squeezing tighter.

“So what do you want them to see, Eve?” Villanelle asks again. She closes her eyes, feels the hiccup of Eve’s heart against her chest, small and fragile in its own deceptive way. They sway a bit and the question sublimates like warm breath, lifts away and is gone. Not everything needs an answer, Eve will learn that someday.

When Eve untucks herself from Villanelle’s neck, eyes clouded with thought, Villanelle laughs at her a bit. She takes everything so seriously, quite irrespective of her insignificance. “You’re right, though,” Villanelle concedes. “They are staring.”

Eve blushes and slips from Villanelle’s fingers. She scoops up the beer in one hand, Villanelle’s cold hand in the other, and pulls them off toward the river.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


She’s quiet after that.

A bottle dangles from her loose fingers, but she only sips from it every so often, an absent fidget. 

The moon hangs low and wide, casts tricky little demons under foot so their shadows dance tall ahead of them. Eve’s does, anyways. Villanelle’s slinks behind her.

The river catches the light in the stiff tension of its surface, shining it like expensive silver. Eve says she likes that and Villanelle collects the information, to whatever end that could pay dividends in the future.

Eventually, Eve’s feet slow and she stops to stare at the river’s plating. Villanelle slows too and falls back to join her, hunting around their feet for the best skipping rocks. Thin and delicate, smooth and as close to round as nature can manage.

Several acceptable candidates later, Villanelle returns to Eve’s side and holds them out in cupped palms for her inspection and approval.

She takes a few, leaves others, skips the winners and then they do it all over again. On one such expedition, Villanelle finds it again: another perfect skipping rock. Unmatched and unnatural like someone cut it from a mould.

“Do you feel free?” Eve asks her, hands shoved into her coat pockets against the cold.

Villanelle shrugs. “I have never considered. I don’t call it freedom. I just am. And I just do. I am only my own desires and nothing else.”

“Until me.”

Villanelle laughs under her breath. “Okay, I _was.”_

Eve goes quiet and Villanelle stands, swiping the pad of her thumb across the stone’s perfect surface until it shines like the river. She lets it sit in her palm a moment, then comes to stand with toes touching Eve’s and holds it out for her. Eve looks down at it, then up at her, then down, then up again and Villanelle hangs a smile on her face, encouraging.

When Eve finally reaches out her hand to Villanelle’s open palm, her fingers land on the stone and stay there. Eve is still staring at her and Villanelle wonders what she sees, how much, how little. She feels quite evil for the way Eve’s eyes shine at her.

“Are you about to make bad choices, Eve?”

Eve’s lips pout in determination and it thrills her.

“I like you best like this,” Villanelle confesses. “I like you best when you’re falling.”

“I like you best when you’re quiet,” Eve snips back, wrapping a hand in the lapel of Villanelle’s coat.

Villanelle leans down, licking her teeth and taking in a long immeasurable breath, one she hasn’t taken in ages. “No you don’t. You like me best when I’m yours.”

“I think you may be the worst thing to ever happen to me,” Eve says, quite oblivious of who is doing the happening. We all _happen_ , it’s purposeless to point fingers.

_Some measure of power restored_ , Villanelle has time to think, just before Eve coaxes her down a few inches and kisses her by the river. Villanelle feels it like a crown being set on her head, a rooster crowing in her chest, _gotcha, Eve!_

Everyone wants. Even if it is something so strange as a thing just the way it is.

“Remember this is supposed to be your last night, Eve,” Villanelle reminds her, soft against her lips, just to twist the knife in deeper. She’s never been accused of being a gracious winner.

Eve breathes through her teeth heavily, annoyed, “I know,” she exhales, then pushes the rest into Villanelle’s mouth as she reels her in. 

The stone slips from Villanelle’s hand, unskipped, and as Villanelle brings her tighter against her body, her long billowing coat swoops forward, hangs open and enfolds Eve as she presses closer.

Villanelle’s content to be had like this, tugged and plundered to Eve’s liking, until control slips from Eve’s fingers like perfect stones and she sags into Villanelle like she wants to be swallowed whole.

And Villanelle’s content to do that too, of course. Whatever she wants.

Eve gasps a little, fragile thing when Villanelle’s sharp nails dig into the small of her back and leave tiny pink marks on her fluttering throat. It reminds Villanelle to play her gently, press to please only. Her tongue flicks up along the back of Eve’s teeth and earns her a pleased noise she feels like warm blood in her mouth. It could be, if she’s not careful.

Careful, careful, careful.

Villanelle groans, of all things, pressing harder with her mouth so her hands don’t dig into Eve and make a mess of her. Eve’s chin tips down so she can break and breathe, eyes wide to siphon some of the moon’s glow, even as Villanelle’s leaning shadow swallows her whole.

“You never blink, you know.”

Villanelle cocks her head to the side, a confused smile pulling her mouth the same direction.

“It’s what made me watch you that first night. It’s what gave you away.”

Villanelle laughs involuntarily before she can press her lips together.

Eve runs hands the length of Villanelle’s jaw, down the slope of her nose, then around her neck. “You should blink more,” she diagnoses.

“If I blink, you’ll be gone. You’re very sneaky like that.”

Eve rolls her eyes - and they accuse Villanelle of being nihilistic. “I’ll tell you before I go.”

“Promise?”

Eve kisses her and that’ll have to do just as well. It’s better than something like a vowed word - she feels it and thinks she’ll feel it a long time yet, a contract penned on her ribs. She’d like to lift her shirt and see it there. Just in case.

“Be good to me,” Villanelle requests, amused and serious all at once.

Eve nods back, amused and serious at all at once.

“Do you feel free yet?”

“Not yet,” Eve says with _intent._

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Husband leaves shortly after that. He packs the best parts of the house and leaves stone-faced and heartbroken, boohoo. Villanelle gets him a very nice suitcase and leaves it at their closed door. Eve doesn’t speak to her for a week.

When she’s allowed back in the house, Villanelle runs her hands over everything, wedges herself into Eve’s tiny life by showering her with replacements for Husband’s finer tastes. Eve’s mopey and barely fights it, but she comes around. Eventually, Eve comes to fill the space too with a mutual relief. She’s no longer _Eve-and_ . She’s just _Eve._

Villanelle still doesn’t fully understand what _long_ is, but she tries not to disappear too often, too _long._ She tries to be pretty and normal when she comes to Eve in her slowly changing home, though it’s never quite normal. Eve will tease her for teeth, eyes, nails, length, the smudge of someone’s misfortune still caught at the corner of her mouth. It feels something like warmth, like if blood could flush under her skin.

More often than not, Villanelle sneaks in, slips creeping fingers under Eve’s arms as she stands at the kitchen window and reels her back against the wind-brushed cold of her front. She can never seem to surprise her, though. Despite what Eve’s invited into her home, she seems peaceful in the aftermath. The unknown doesn’t crawl under collar and chafe. The unknown stays for tea.

“Do you feel free yet?” Villanelle always asks.

Eve bundles herself in the arms around her waist. “Not yet.”

And who knows, maybe Eve will keep her.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Having looks good on Eve, but not as good as wanting more. The more Villanelle gives, the more Eve starves, it seems. She takes to kissing Villanelle with sharper edges, digging in harder, pulling closer, opening wider.

Villanelle enjoys this. The wanting, the giving, the needing, the dancing out of reach. It riles Eve up and anger is a transmutable thing, it’s perfect really. It’s raw material easily molded into a sensuality Villanelle feels under her fingers like pressing notes into a stringed instrument, tension pulled taught across delicate boards balanced to sing, but a fault line from snapping.

She’d never been one much for music, but this tune sticks in her head. Vibrates at a frequency she feels in her teeth. It’s like something crawling up her throat, whistling out through her clenched teeth, the need to touch. The need to consume.

Villanelle finds Eve outside again like they used to be, before homes and tea and accepted invitations. Just the way they were, idea and concept on a gardenless garden bench under a willow with hardly the breadth to weep. She wonders what game they’re playing and comes to stand over Eve where she sits. As always, she thinks passively of swallowing her whole.

Eve glances up and closes the small book in her lap.

“It’s much too dark to be reading.”

Eve tosses the book beside her on the bench and levels Villanelle with a look she’s sure could successfully demand just about anything of her. “It is,” she agrees simply, but it sounds like another command.

Villanelle thinks she’d like to look up at her rather than down at her and crouches low to balance on her toes, folding forearms over her bent knees so she can do just that. Eve’s expression is shadowed from her new vantage, darker in a way she’d like to taste if she could. The way Eve’s fingers pull through the hair curled over Villanelle’s shoulder before twisting harshly into the front of her coat sits on the back of her tongue. She kneads it against the roof of her mouth.

“I want you. You know that,” Eve accuses.

“I told you everyone wants. You’re not special.”

“I’m not. What is it that _you_ want then? Tell me.”

Villanelle waits for Eve’s fingers to tighten, her eyes to flash dangerously, before smiling and demuring, just for fun. “All I _do_ is want. I _am_ want, Eve.”

“You’re not special,” Eve snaps back like a silenced shot, then _takes._

It’s instinct to try to rise and gain footing, she’s not a thing that has much use for intimacy or sex without control. Is there such a thing, really? But there’s value too in knowing the unknown - Eve insists - so Villanelle doesn’t struggle when Eve pushes forcefully on her shoulders, holding her down like she’s jealous of the power Villanelle wields. It’s not power, it’s desire. Want and fulfil, drink deep or risk losing the lion’s share.

Eve will learn, she’s a quick study.

Eve tugs on Villanelle’s pretty hair then wraps hands around her pretty throat and it makes her giddy to see Eve weak at last. Better yet, to feel it in the kick of her pulse and the bite of her blunt teeth. She can’t hurt her with her soft hands, but maybe Villanelle was wrong about intention being worthless.

It’s not enough, evidently. Eve shoves forward off the edge of the bench seat and Villanelle has to concede ground, falling back onto her bottom and catching Eve with hands keeping her high on her thighs. Villanelle’s not without mercy, she sees the shuddering fuse of frustration burning short on Eve’s face and breathes out through her nose slowly. “What do you want?” She asks graciously.

“You,” Eve repeats ragged with it, but she misunderstands.

“Yes, I see that. I can be anything, though,” Villanelle reminds her. “What makes you weak, hm? What makes you careless and shameless? What makes you scream, Eve? I promise I won’t even tease you.”

Eve’s hands tighten at the base of her neck, an inexperienced hold that wouldn’t hardly make a newborn lightheaded. “Just you.”

“You, my dear, lack imagination.”

“And what do you lack?” Her voice drops. “You’ve promised me everything and so far you haven’t done much giving. If I’m not more than a blink to you, then you don’t have much time to waste.”

  
  


___________________

  
  
  


_Time_ , foreign, but increasingly appreciated.

Villanelle parses it out more thoughtfully, then.

Eve’s an interesting flavor in the realm of sex, control, give, and take. Preconceived notions, sure. A certain performative insecurity that Villanelle thinks shouldn’t be much harder to remove than tight pants or healthy skin on bone.

For a moment, Villanelle watches her fumble at her own clothes under Villanelle’s scrutiny. Her arms have come up between them, a subconscious barrier. But if Eve is to give, she’s to give freely.

Her hands are cold from the garden when Villanelle catches one sternly in her own - not as cold as Villanelle’s, but cold enough that she doesn’t shy away at her touch. She’s bunched up against her bedroom door looking nervous and Villanelle holds one finger up in front of Eve’s nose. “Let me.” Her finger ticks to the side and she looks evenly into Eve’s wide eyes. “Let me and I let you.”

Eve’s tendons unwild under Villanelle’s fingers, wrist limp so Villanelle can let her go. “Sex isn’t a role you play, Eve,” Villanelle chides with a little laugh. “Good performers never make very good lovers.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eve pouts, but lets Villanelle escort her from her shirt with easy movements. “Don’t patronize me.”

“Quite the opposite,” Villanelle assures her, bringing Eve’s hands up by her loose wrists until she’s guided them under the heavy weight of Villanelle’s coat. Only Eve can do this. Only Eve can crawl into the beast's mouth and live.

Eve takes the message and her attention drifts from Villanelle’s face to the pressing weight of shucking the jacket from her shoulders. Inspired, her fingers pull at one end of the hideous scarf until it slides off from around her neck to the ground. Appreciatively, Eve runs a hand down the front of Villanelle’s sensible shirt before untucking the buttons from their fastening one at a time, top to bottom. Neat.

Eve pushes that off her shoulders too and Villanelle nods, _you see?_

“I’m saying I’ve offered to be anything. You’ve asked for me. And now I am asking for you.”

“This is me,” Eve sighs, running a hand through her hair. “If you’re advocating I need to think harder about that, this is going to be dull,” she mutters, turning to walk toward the bed.

Villanelle catches her about the waist before she can get too far and spins them so Eve’s clattering to her forearms on top of her cluttered vanity. They ignore what topples as Villanelle guides Eve’s palms flat to the finished maple and smooths her curved spine with a firm stroke of her hand. She hums over Eve’s gasp and takes the opportunity to divest Eve of her trousers with a gentle pat to her thigh when she needs a shift or an assist.

Eve tries to turn when Villanelle’s taking care of her own, but she splays a hand between her shoulder blades with firm pressure and murmurs her dissent until Eve drops the issue. When she’s able, Villanelle takes the time to run both hands along Eve’s skin, then her lips, and maybe a little bit her teeth, she’s quite powerless to it.

“Quite the opposite,” she says again behind Eve’s ear as she settles into a comfortable bracket of Eve’s slim hips, slipping cold fingers up under her belly to stroke from sternum to center, low, low into territory that makes Eve squirm.

“Okay?” Villanelle asks, eyes darting up to watch Eve’s expression in the vanity mirror. 

Eve catches her eye and barely breathes sound into her return, “ _Okay_.”

It’s less about mechanics than about the things a person wants to hear, the things a person wants to feel, the things a person wants to know or believe. So as Villanelle’s fingers burrow into her and seek out a satisfactory push and pull, she takes the opportunity to drag her nose along the expanse of her bare shoulder and watch her pretty, shuddering face as she considers what it might be that Eve would like to know in this moment. You can fuck a person raw and it won’t come close to tickling the things they’re afraid to know about themselves. Afraid but desperate.

“You’re the only thing I’ve ever wanted bad enough not to have,” she muses, calm despite the way Eve’s knees knock against the vanity as Villanelle pushes into her again and again, their reflection warbling as the mirror hits the wall. She thinks she looks quite gruesome that way, lost and volatile as her fingers strain further into Eve’s flesh - failure to multitask, perhaps - and Eve’s torn between pinching her eyes shut intermittently and staring back, unblinking too. “I think if I wanted you any less, I’d have painted you across a wall by now. You’d be dead.”

Eve’s nails scratch audibly as her fingers clench and scrape across the wood grain. She makes a nice noise like spitting sound whistled between wet teeth.

  
Villanelle smiles. That’ll do.

“You’re safe, though,” she chuckles. Her teeth prick at the skin she’s nudged her face into low on Eve’s neck, but she tempers it, she’s promised. She _barely_ draws blood.

“Not too safe?”

Villanelle’s snort of laughter pushes cold against her skin and she tosses her eyes playfully so Eve can see in the mirror. “Whatever you want.”

“Now who’s performing - _ah-”_

_Too clever for her own good,_ Villanelle decides and twists deeper, longer, angles the way she knows they like and she does distantly feel some kind of remorse for the duplex neighbors on the other side of the wall. 

Oh, my. She’s not quiet at all. That’s very good. Quite vulgar, actually.

“Eve, the neighbors will complain,” she says behind her ear and Eve whines.

“Shut up. I’m close.”

One of Eve’s hands shoot back to snatch hers from where it’s been anchoring their knocking bodies together to pin it to the counter so hard her fingernails would’ve had potential to draw blood too if they weren’t what they were, the two of them.

“I was using that,” Villanelle murmurs and has to take her hold elsewhere, by teeth she can barely keep from lethal. Eve doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, she asks her not to stop again and Villanelle’s never needed to hear it twice. Sex is like murder that way too, and she’s a bit of an expert in holding desperate bodies down.

Eve pushes back into the mould of her body like she’d like to be the next skin Villanelle wears and Villanelle thinks she might be breathing harder than Eve as her fingers twist to press down hard against the front of her insides until she squeezes tight and chokes.

When she comes that first time, her hand actually shoots up and pulls her harder against her bleeding shoulder by a fistful of hair. Interesting.

“Jesus, why are your fingers so long.”

Villanelle loosens her hold and drags her tongue slowly along the jagged indents she’s stamped into Eve’s skin, just a taste, just a bit. “I cheated,” she admits after a few moments.

“I knew it. Asshole.”

“For you!”

Eve’s hands uncurl and she rubs a finger absently into a puddle of spilled product, one of many casualties. “Okay, well. You’re putting me at a disadvantage, demon fingers.”

“Stop!” Villanelle laughs, her hand falling from between Eve’s legs as she brushes a kiss to the side of Eve’s head. “You told me to be me. I am unsettling and wrong and you like me in spite of it. At your worst, you like me because of it.”

Eve doesn’t resist when Villanelle uses the looseness of Eve’s unwound muscles to spin her around with hands pushing and pulling at the torque of her hips. As she faces her, Villanelle lifts her gently so she’s sitting naked on the vanity, chest and cheeks flushed all the way up her throat, practically full to bursting with it...

Tasting...may have been a mistake. She’ll manage.

Automatically, Eve’s knees try to close and Villanelle _tsks_ at her, keeping them open with quick hands and the wedge of her body pushing between them. “No need to get self-conscious now.”

Eve’s eyes narrow a moment, then she holds up both hands in surrender, palms empty as she lounges back against the vanity in a way Villanelle would hang in a museum if she thought anyone else deserved to see it. But no. She thinks she’ll keep it for herself. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever felt exposed, have you,” Eve gestures vaguely at her, reclined back on one elbow.

Villanelle gives her an amused look. “Do you feel exposed?”

“I did. Still do maybe. But then, nobody’s really naked around _you_ until you see the whites of their bones, are they?”

Villanelle shivers, it’s nice to be seen she thinks, bones or not. There’s much worse than _bones_ beneath us, certainly beneath her. “Are you jealous?”

“No. I just wish I could make you feel the same.”

Her palms skim down the tops of Eve’s spread thighs from hip to knee and she bows forward to scrape her teeth against the front of Eve’s throat, the thin skin of her jaw. “You already do. And that’s much harder than taking clothes off, so feel free to _gloat._ ”

She likes the way Eve gloats. Her reward is in the way she pulls at Villanelle’s face to kiss her the way she likes at the pace she likes, as long as she likes. Then she’s happy to push her lower, past the sluggish wound at her neck like she’s daring her to detour. She doesn’t!

Cheeky.

Villanelle blunts her teeth against one of Eve’s breasts as she’s held there, swapping pleasant shivers when Eve repays her with soft fingers stroking down the notches of her spine and cradling the back of her head. Before Eve pushes her lower, she curls forward over her own heaving breasts to whisper as close to Villanelle’s ear as she can manage, “You can cheat a little.”

Her chuckle drags down the length of Eve’s belly, tumbling down as she slips from Eve’s push into her own pull, almost escaping Eve’s grasping fingers. She doesn’t go too far, though, just enough to fall between her thighs and drag the cheating length of her tongue through the mess she’d left behind. It’s only polite.

People have no concept of just how honest they are. It’s not that they aren’t truthful, it’s that they’re deaf to their own signals. Villanelle can smell the cocktail of hormones and sweat and she _knows_ she’s wanted. And if that didn’t tell her so, Eve keeps her there with shamelessly domineering hands and thighs that can’t seem to decide if they want to snap shut or fall open. They do a bit of both as her muscles jump the way she’s strummed. It’s Villanelle’s fault, she knows, so she does her the favor of seizing the insides of Eve’s knees and peeling her open, holding her down sternly so they both get what they want.

Eve pulls her hair harder, _fair’s fair._

As far as having her mouth around a cunt goes, it’s a uniquely sobering experience. She’s not often granted opportunity for self-reflection, but she does have the moment. Just the one: Eve’s voice goes toneless even when she tries to hiccup grateful little noises and half-words and thoughts, her tender heart twists in on itself until it wrings out an apology for tugging too hard at Villanelle’s pretty hair, and when Villanelle cheats _a lot_ , so deeply Eve has to confront that she’s not playing wife to a warm body, but playing god to a monster -

Well, she has that one moment to think endless _is_ a scary thing.

She blinks and slows, tongue still pressed to Eve’s weeping cunt like that’s any time to get a little sad about endings. And instead of demanding her harder, Eve pushes hair back from her forehead and smiles down the length of her chest as it ebbs and flows with deep, desperate breaths. “You - you’re -”

“I know,” Villanelle chuckles, shaking off her own sobriety. It doesn’t do to dwell, they just don’t have the time for it. Eve doesn’t. “You’ll have to name me eventually,” she teases. “You need something to scream,” she presses against her sex harder with a muted laugh trapped in the back of her throat.

Eve laughs too and even that’s sexy, the way it turns frantic and brash as Villanelle pushes her to finish, sucking at her cruelly until it must hurt to feel that good. Villanelle can only hope.

Eve doesn’t shy from the pain or the pleasure, she holds her down harder and Villanelle considers that a victory. They’ve shed skin.

When she’s released, she doesn’t bother wiping her mouth or her chin, she just drags it up the jumping muscles of Eve’s belly and sucks a mark into her ribs, red and angry like the flush of her eyes. “See?” She purrs against her throat.

“See? I can barely hear. I’ve never come so hard my ears popped.”

“I am speaking of you. Being you and not a person you wear to bait kind husbands.”

Eve kisses her wet mouth, then her cheek, then coaxes her down to rest in the propped cradle of her warm body, even as the vanity must dig into her back and her bottom. It’s not comfortable, but it’s restful. “I stopped wearing that a while since.”

“Hm.” Villanelle thinks it was either true then or it’s true now, but surely what matters is that it’s true. “I like you best like this.”

“Bold of _you_ to accuse me of wearing skins.”

“I know, I thought it was funny.”

Eve’s hands wiggle between their pressed bodies and manage to brace against Villanelle’s chest to push her back an agonizing inch. “How can I ever really know you?”

“You can’t!” Villanelle laughs and pecks her pouting lips. “It’s not your fault. The only fault you bear is thinking you have to know everything.” She smiles fondly at her and glances down to watch one of her own pointed nails press into the soft skin stretched taught across her sternum until the tension bleeds red under the stretch of her skin. She doesn’t push harder, just drags it down between her breasts and watches the thin red line it raises.

Eve sighs and shifts her weight to one shaking arm to free the other just for the simple act of trapping Villanelle’s hand against her delicate ribs, fingers locked together. “I don’t care that I don’t know you. I care that you might never experience _being known._ ”

That…

Villanelle frowns and opens her mouth, but no noise comes out. She takes the moment to clear her throat, eyes darting away from Eve’s. “I...that wouldn’t…”

“I know,” she shushes her, one finger to her lips. “You’re very scary and I’m very two dimensional. I just love you, that’s all.”

Before she can help it much, she finds herself making a rather unattractive snort in the back of her throat, pressing the rest of it into Eve’s chest as she drops her forehead to her chest. “That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Why do we do this to ourselves?” Villanelle wonders. “Why do you wed yourself to a thing that enjoys the taste of your blood and why do I knot myself tighter and tighter to something with a shorter half life than good wine. I don’t know. I think if I fuck you hard enough I’ll remember you, I’ll have you even when I don’t.”

“You’re romantic, you know that?”

“When we met I told you I was going to kill you awfully.”

“And you didn’t. Isn’t that sweet?” Eve asks like it is, she really can’t find insincerity in the sentiment. 

Villanelle never really thought she was half of anything, but she finds herself staring at what might be something she’d dropped along the way. It’s staring back. It’s smiling and loving her back for whatever reason, so it must’ve been hers all along. She wonders what else she’s had all along, what else she’s carried with her. It feels obvious. “I said what I said.”

Villanelle feels it filling her chest like popped lungs, drowning, maybe - this thing. Unmentionable, really. They’ve mentioned it, but _unmentionable_ , embarrassing. “Take it back.”

“No.”

With a grunt, Villanelle scoops Eve up under her cramping thighs, hoisting her while she curses and wriggles, making a mess of the thing. “Stop, I’m going to drop you,” Villanelle says wryly as she heads toward the bed.

Eve slaps her in the back of the head, then resigns herself to the journey.

“Ouch.”

The dumping on the bed would’ve been gentler without the slap, they’ll just both have to concede that later.

“You’re not tired, are you?” Villanelle asks absently, as she stretches herself out and crawls up Eve’s hips, thinking of the many ways she’d like to burn herself into Eve’s skin, under it even. “It’s so boring when you sleep.”

She’s actually taken by surprise when Eve wraps her leg around Villanelle’s calf and uses the twisting advantage with both hands pushing into her chest so she’s rolled and hits the quilt with a little grunt. Then she’s left blinking up at Eve and it’s not a bad view to be left with, all told.

“I’m not tired, no,” Eve says mischievously, mounting her waist and sitting astride her rather proudly. “I want to touch you.”

“Have at it then.”

Eve’s mouth flattens and her nails dig into Villanelle’s sensitive ribs when she leans down. “What do you like?”

“You,” Villanelle teases, they’re not so different, the two of them. “Am I not what you like right now? Wrong hardware? Tell me what you’d like.”

“I asked first.”

Villanelle shrugs, drifting fingers down the skin she can reach above her. “I’m not a homely Polish man. I’m not even a pretty girl, really. But I like you any which way. Can you say the same about me?”

“I can and I will. Whenever you want.”

“Okay. Just touch me, then,” she sighs happily, quite through with the talking and the parsing. If Eve is determined to peel back skins painted over and over, deep like old walls primed inches thick until the room’s shrunk, then _fine._ She’s many things, Eve can have as many of them as she likes, it might be nice to have the space back when they’re through someday. “You tried to hurt me earlier and I enjoyed that, you know? Don’t stop now, you were doing well.”

Let it not be said Eve isn’t a passionate learner. She really does her best on shaking newborn knees, she digs in with blunt nails and teeth and when Villanelle gets too sharp, too strange or too soft, she holds that down too. Her hands are too weak to do any real harm, but there’s something about the act of trying that makes her sing.

“Is it everything you pictured?” Villanelle pants, pushed roughly by her shoulders so her face is in the bedding, _very_ surprising, Eve likes her like this. She likes her back and she likes to press fingers into the divots her hips sink into her skin. Very primal of a creature who was a dutiful wife prior to corruption. Villanelle’s never taken to her knees so readily.

“You are, thus far, incapable of _being pictured._ ”

Villanelle strangles a little laugh and groans, pushing back into Eve’s tugging fingers, her _want,_ as it were. There’s nothing she could really do to Villanelle, no way she could fuck her that would feel better than the act of her _taking._ She might know that, she might not. For once, knowing has nothing to do with the matter, really. By having, Eve gives.

“You’re already fucking me, you don’t have to be nice.”

“I have no plans to be nice,” she snaps and it lashes against the back of her neck as Eve bends to press her forehead into Villanelle’s spine. Villanelle is as unwound, as naked as she’s ever been, may never be again, and Eve only digs in harder. She’s very wicked that way, liking this thing she can play at holding down but can barely comprehend.

“Can you come?”

“I can do anything.”

“Not without my permission, you can’t.”

Villanelle grins, doesn’t even try to control it as her grotesque fingers curl and tear holes in the nice quilt. “Take your shot, Eve,” she says darkly.

Eve bites harder than Villanelle did, hissing short breath against her skin as her fingers find the right notes to prove her point, violently so. It hurts just right.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


“I’d like to see morning with you,” Villanelle muses, a thought she’d never really entertained before. Eve’s less clingy than she’d imagined, less cuddly. A little bossy when she gets a taste of control, but kind when you grant it. Villanelle gamely resists the urge to pout about it, Eve’s soft and nice to hold.

“What? And die?” Eve teases, barely paying attention to her.

“Let’s find out.”

Eve hums, disinterested.

“I like the idea of morning, I think. What will you call me when you can see me?”

Eve flips a page in her little book. “I can see you now.”

“Then what will you call me when everyone else can see me?”

She’s actually reading again and Villanelle’s trying to decide if that’s an insult or not. They’re still naked, Eve’s lying perpendicular, lounging with her head on Villanelle’s stomach with one ankle propped on her upright knee. _Reading._

“If you’re going to bend me over, you could at least pay attention to me afterward.”

Eve snorts and dog-ears a page, closing her chapter. “Aw, do you want me to hold you?”

“Shut up. Yes.”

Eve rolls gracelessly, wrangling covers out from under their twisted bodies to wrap themselves together and gather Villanelle in her arms. “You bent me over too.”

“You were rougher.”

“My shoulder is bleeding.”

“Yeah,” VIllanelle laughs, butting her forehead into Eve’s neck while she hums with disapproval. “I’m no good at all.”

“No you’re not,” Eve agrees, twisting ringlets into the back of Villanelle’s hair, tight enough to tug, but not hurt before she lets them unwind and start over. “You were right, though. You need a name and I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Really? Don’t be rude about it. I’ll say no if I don’t like it. Then I’ll eat you whole.”

“That’s no longer quite the threat you think it is.” Eve turns and fumbles around with one hand behind her for a moment before emerging with the book again.

Villanelle frowns.

“It’s poetry,” Eve explains and Villanelle frowns harder. _Poetry_ is Eve pulling her hair while she fucks her with her tongue. That’s poetry.

Villanelle doesn’t want to get swatted, though, so she raises her eyebrows and waits.

“Villanelles specifically.”

“Okay?”

Eve gestures with the worn cover of the book, evading the point entirely. “Simple French poetry, it was formless once upon a time before they ruined it with structure. They’re my favorite.”

“Okay?”

Eve shakes her head with a smile and tosses the book aside, rolling to kiss her on the nose. “That’s you. That’s your name.”

“Your Favorite?”

“Very funny.”  
  


They really are running short on moonlight, it’s fading to a dusky rose and then she imagines Eve will get some rest or do some mundane little human things like drink coffee and take buses. Fun to imagine, fun to daydream. She’ll never see it, but seeing isn’t everything.

Eve has named her and thus brought her a measure of existence she’ll never shake as short as she may live. You don’t name a thing and walk away.

“It’s nice,” Villanelle muses, breathing against Eve’s skin as a shiver raises across it. _“Villanelle._ I’m sure when I look back, I’ll think I’ve always been that. Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it? I don’t remember how I was born or that I ever was. I might not even remember this. It’s something that’ll just...be.”

“Good,” Eve says and that’s that.

Eve doesn’t ask her if she’ll stay, but Villanelle would like to say _yes, yes as long as you want._ Then she’d like to ask Eve the same. And Eve will lie and say yes, though she won’t - not really. She’ll stay as long as she can, but she’ll be wrong, it’s not _long._ _Years_ is not long, none of it is. What’s long is after. What’s long is knowing and being and after.

And Villanelle's sure somewhere along the way she blinks, but it’s not really the kind of thing you remember either. It’s such a common thing.

  
  


____________________

xend.

____________________

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> eve fucked the monster lmfao. goodnight loves :E


End file.
